Booster Savvy delivers all the handy features of a digital wallet, and more! Not only does it provide a range of functions to help plan your finances and supercharge your savings, it also offers a great interest rate of 5% p.a. The perfect tool for tech-savvy users to give their finances a boost, Booster Savvy is a worthy winner of one of this year’s Canstar Innovation Awards.
What is Booster Savvy?
Designed for young, tech-savvy New Zealanders, Savvy is a modern tool to save and spend that combines an investment account with a Mastercard debit card.
Savvy is not a bank, rather it works like a digital wallet, one that is linked to an investment account, meaning you can earn a set rate of return on your money that is not affected by your daily spend.
Delivering customers competitive returns, currently 5% p.a., and cost-effectiveness, Savvy offers an array of savings features, including:
- Boost: rounds up transactions to the nearest 50c, $1 or $5 saving the difference
- Salary Split: Savvy learns when users get paid and lets them allocate and save portions of their income automatically into different savings funds, called Stacks
- Sweep: puts money left after a pay cycle into a designated Stack
- Forecasts: Savvy learns to predict bills and lets you know how much you’ve got left to spend
- Cashflow snapshot: reports on your expenditure, daily, weekly and monthly
Booster Savvy: what does it cost?
Savvy does not charge account, card or transaction fees on domestic transactions, although international transaction and FX fees do apply.
Booster does charge a fee for its services, but this does not come from your account balance. Instead it comes from the investments made using all Booster Savvy customers’ funds, and is capped at 0.6%. This fee is taken after covering the costs of running the fund and after your set 5% return is paid.
So, for all intents and purposes, Booster Savvy is a fee-free service for all regular domestic transactions. Although as with any credit card/debit card merchant fees can apply, for example tap-and-go surcharges.
What are Canstar’s Innovation Excellence Awards
Canstar’s Innovation Excellence Awards reward the best and most innovative financial products to come to market over the past 12 months. All submissions and nominations for the 2024 Innovation Excellence Awards were judged and assessed by Canstar’s expert research committee using our sophisticated and unique ratings methodology.
Products and services assessed were measured and calculated against two factors:
Degree of innovation:
- How unique is the product?
- How disruptive is the innovation?
- Does it have a WOW factor?
Impact:
- How many customers does it benefit?
- Is it affordable and easy to use?
- How will it improve and affect a consumer’s life?
All these factors were scored on a rating from one to five, and then weighted to produce a final score. The degree of innovation is weighted at 40% and a product’s impact is weighted at 60%.
You can learn more about the evaluation and calculation details in our awards methodology, here.
What our judges said about Booster Savvy
In awarding Booster Savvy a 2024 Canstar Innovation Excellence Award, our expert panel noted that it’s a first-of-its-kind product in New Zealand: a digital wallet and Mastercard debit card linked to an investment account.
The panel commend Savvy for offering competitive returns alongside an array of automated saving and budgeting tools that, ultimately, has the power to change how users manage, save and spend their money.
Canstar’s judges found Savvy to be particularly unique, and possessing considerably wow factor due to its outside-the-box approach to money management.
Savvy’s fee-free approach was also commended. That it charges no account, card or domestic transaction fees, makes it an attractive for budget-conscious, digital-savvy savers.
For Canstar’s full Innovation Excellence Awards 2024 click here!
About the author of this page
This report was written by Canstar’s Editor, Bruce Pitchers. Bruce has three decades’ experience as a journalist and has worked for major media companies in the UK and Australasia, including ACP, Bauer Media Group, Fairfax, Pacific Magazines, News Corp and TVNZ. Prior to Canstar, he worked as a freelancer, including for The Australian Financial Review, the NZ Financial Markets Authority, and for real estate companies on both sides of the Tasman.
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