After months of wireframe sketching, intense coding, late night dinners at Mandoo Bar, and copious amounts of Starbucks and Gregory’s Coffee, Movenbank has launched our latest version of our website complete with our proprietary CRED relationship and credibility score. We’re also delighted to announce our latest funding round, because it means that our coders can finally pay their rents on time – no more sleeping on the office floor!

We started out thinking we should handle our releases like Apple does, with security, stealth and unending mystery, but it occurred to us fairly early in the process that we actually needed feedback at various stages of our internal development. So when we first launched our website late last year, we built up a community of initial users we called our “Alpha team”, who could help us with that.

We’ve been bringing in some of the Alpha team members into our office here in New York, and engaging others online via Twitter, Facebook, etc to get their feedback as we go, and that has all resulted in multiple tweaks and iterations of our plans.

Already more than 5,000 Alpha customers have had their first glimpse of CRED and we’ve launched a site specifically on the advantages that CRED offers our customers. The recent ‘whatiscred.com’ site launch includes a fantastic video animation, developed by Hugh McLeod of @gapingvoid fame, that introduces CRED and Movenbank’s philosophy of transparency, great service, straightforward advice and feedback. Our objective is not just simpler, better banking services, but giving consumers real control over their financial health.

Why launch with CRED?

No application forms – CRED allows us to create a central profile of our customers so that they never again have to fill out those crazy application forms. If we need more detail over time, we use CRED to build the required customer information and we do all the tricky stuff at the back end to deliver the product.

Understand your financial health – central to Movenbank is a real-time, feedback loop each time you make a purchase with your phone, giving you get greater control over your finances. As you make smart saving decisions, your CRED score goes up and your fees go down.

Social is in our DNA – we rely on word of mouth to grow Movenbank, so when you tell your friends about Movenbank we believe you should be rewarded. So when you shout out, your CRED goes up, and you get the benefits.

Spend, Save, Live Smarter – at the core of our feedback loop is an intuitive categorization of your spending behavior so you can see in real-time how you are spending your money, and where there are those everyday opportunities for improving your savings.

CRED is not a replacement for a credit score – it is a personal, financial credibility score and it’s a way for consumers to measure their financial health in real-time everyday. It’s also our way of making Movenbank transparent, frictionless and super-responsive.

Our funding announcement is already making the rounds in the mainstream press, but our initial seed round enables us to continue building Movenbank and get the banked product out to market this year. We raised just south of $2.5m this time around, in addition to the cash invested by Movenbank’s founders over the last 18 months. We’ve been joined by the team at Anthemis Group, Kevin Plank the founder of UnderArmor, Jim Pallotta of Raptor and a syndicate of investors out of Singapore.

We think Movenbank rocks and we’d love to change the way you think about your day-to-day banking experience. Thanks for following our progress!