The Chip App is an application that lets users seamlessly grow their savings: It lets you set and reach goals without having to put in much effort. It does so with an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence that will calculate the amount you can afford to save, then automatically saves that amount for you.

The application has the goal of helping people put money into their savings in a way that makes them feel good. The application works automatically, doing the hard work for you so you do not have to worry about figuring out how much you can afford to save.

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How Does Chip Work?

Chip is designed to put your money into savings in an intelligent manner that depends on your spending habits. The algorithm looks at your spending and the amount you have, then uses this to calculate the amount you can afford to put in your Chip account without negatively impacting your current life. Every few days, Chip will automatically transfer small quantities of money from the account you link into your Chip account, taking out the guesswork on your part.

How Else Does Chip Help Your Savings Grow?

The biggest way that Chip helps you grow your savings is by automatically putting money to the side in a way that you will not notice and will not have an impact on your daily spending. Chip then supplements this with the ability to earn as much as 5 percent interest on your Chip account, a figure that is better than the typical bank given the current economy. To get this interest rate, get your friends to sign up and start using Chip. Each friend who signs up using your promotional code will add 1 percent to your interest rate, up to a maximum of 5 percent. That interest is calculated every week and paid quarterly.

Invite Your Friends to Increase Interest Rate

To invite a friend, click on the tab titled “Free money” in the application’s sidebar. Choose people from your contact list to invite. The application automatically recognizes that you sent the invite if those numbers sign up, automatically applying the bonus for your account once the invitee makes the first (automatic or manual) transfer to their Chip account. From there, you should get your bonus within three days.

There are also bonuses for those who accept a Chip invitation, which they will also receive within three days of the first transaction into the account. If you want to see whether a friend has signed up or funded a Chip account, you can do this via the “Free money” tab.

The starting interest rate is just 1% but you will earn an extra 1% for every friend you refer up to 5% in total. Your friends will also get an extra 1% for using your referral code.

Personally, I think the refer a friend feature would be better if they offered hard cash for sending referrals their was and put you on to the highest interest rate from the start. That would certainly make using the app more attractive.

How Much Can you Save?

When you look at the Chip application, you will see a button labeled “Manual.” This lets you manually transfer money from your current bank account to your Chip savings account. Each transfer must be at least £1, and you can transfer as much as £100 daily to your Chip account. You can only transfer this maximum of £100 daily a total of six times each month. There is no option to set up a standing order to transfer savings to your Chip account; you must do it manually or let the application take care of it automatically.

Can You Adjust How Much Chip Saves for You?

Chip begins by analyzing your spending habits and determining how much you can afford to save based on that information. However, if you disagree with the amount, you can easily have Chip save more or less, and the application will adjust its algorithm accordingly. To do this, click either “Save more” or “Save less” on the application.

Additionally, if your funds are suddenly tight or you simply do not want to use Chip, you do not need to cancel your account. Instead, just click “Pause” in the application, and Chip will stop moving your money into your Chip savings account. At any point you want, just click “Resume,” and the application will go back to saving based on your spending and preferences.

You will also notice that all transactions on the Chip application, both manual and automatic, appear as pending for a while. By law, Chip must wait 48 hours before initiating the direct debit transfer. During this time, you are free to cancel the transfer if you want. As such, you can easily stop a transfer if you forgot to hit “Pause” on the Chip account. Once the money leaves the bank account, it will arrive in the Chip account within a working day.

How Do You Know How Much You Saved with Chip?

To provide complete transparency and let you see your progress, the application gives you real-time data about how much you have saved so far via a glance at your Chip account. When you look at the balance, you will see the current total in your Chip account as well as the amount pending. The same page also shows your total savings since you joined, the average savings, your bonus rate, and the amount of bonus that you are currently owed. The application also includes a built-in tracker that shows you the amount that you have spent so far in a given month and how that compares to spending the previous month.

What Accounts Can You Connect to Chip?

When you create a Chip account, the application will get read-only access to the bank account that you link, and all details are protected via 256-bit bank-grade encryption. The Chip application works to securely connect to accounts from Co-operative Bank, Metro Bank, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Santander, NatWest, Nationwide, Halifax, TSB, RBS, and First Direct.

It is important to note that you can only connect a single current bank account to your Chip account at the time. However, Chip is working to add features, such as a shared Chip account and multiple pots (or savings). If you already have a linked bank account, you can change which account is linked by going into the live chat. Due to money laundering regulations, before disconnecting your current account and linking a new one, Chip will have to return money in your Chip savings account to the relevant bank account. Once that is done, you can connect a new bank account just like you did the first one.

Read: The Complete Guide to Current Accounts in the UK

Where Does Chip Store Your Savings, and How Can You Access It?

The account you open with Chip is a cash account that gets held with an E-Wallet from Barclays. This is where the money Chip saves for you goes directly. If you invite a friend to use Chip, you can earn 1 percent extra on your stash. It is also possible to access the cash in your Chip account at any moment, giving you instant access to the contents of your account.

How Does Chip Help with Overdrafts?

Chip also has a unique feature that helps those dealing with overdrafts. With Chip, you can save money even if you are overdrawn. This feature is designed to make it easier for you to build up an emergency fund, so you can pay off the full overdraft in a single transaction. Chip is also noticeably confident in the algorithm and its ability to calculate what you can actually afford. As such, it has a Chip Overdraft Guarantee that gives you a £10 bonus in your bank account if a Chip automatic transaction leads to you going into overdraft. This guarantee does not apply if you choose to use Chip in overdraft.

What Are Some Advantages of Using Chip?

The biggest benefit of the Chip application is the ability to accumulate savings automatically without any effort on your part and without feeling that you have less funds available. You also can customize the savings, putting away more or less money and withdrawing the funds whenever you want. Chip also includes live chat customer support in the application, FCA regulation, bank-grade security, and 256-bit data encryption. So far, Chip has already saved users £5 million.

Who Is Chip Designed For?

The Chip application is designed to appeal to anyone who wants to enhance their savings and start allocating more money to their savings. It can help those who are not saving and want to start doing so in a way that is automatic and will not impact their lives. It can also help those that have problems keeping up with their current spending lifestyle or those with credit card habits they are trying to get over. Essentially, Chip is designed to help anyone who wants to start saving up for important things.

Read: Our Moneybox Review to Compare

How Do You Start Using Chip?

To begin using Chip, you just download the application, create an account, and link your bank account to your Chip account. To open an account, you will need to enter your date of birth, full name, and the address that is listed on your current bank account. Linking your bank account is as simple as entering the same information required to log into your online banking.

From there, Chip will watch your spending behavior, then use that knowledge to automatically calculate the amount you can afford to save, transferring it to your Chip savings account. The transfers from your bank account into the Chip savings account held by Barclays is done via direct deposit.

What we Didn’t Like About Signing Up

At this point I have to point out that the signup process on the app is very frustrating, instead of letting you simply enter your name, email and other signup details you have to “chat” with their automated bot before you can proceed. I’m sure the app designer thought this was “cool” and was proud of what they made, to me, it was annoying and delayed the signup process. I’m sure this even loses them customers.

The other annoying part was the D.O.B entry process, instead of simply entering your date of birth or picking from drop downs, the date starts at the year 1998 and I had to manually click the back arrow over 200 hundred times to get to my birth year! Horrible UI.

Is the Chip App Intuitive to Use?

The Chip application is indeed simple to use. There are buttons for various functions at the bottom of the page, and clicking any of them gives you the required information or the beginning of the required action.

As mentioned previously, the interface is set up to appear like a text messaging program, so you can easily view everything you input and the response from the Chip application.

Whether you like this style of interface or not is down to personal preference – personally, I do not but maybe younger users would prefer this as it does inject some personality into using the app.

What Information Can You View in the Application?

Once you log into the Chip application, you can click on one of the eight buttons at the bottom of the screen. These are for Balance, Spending, Manual, Withdraw, Save More, Save Less, Pause, and Live Chat.

Clicking Balance will give you the previously mentioned information on your current Chip account balance, the total amount you have saved, the average savings, your bonus rate, and what that bonus adds up to.

Clicking on Spending will show you how much you have spent so far in the month and a spending comparison, so you can see whether you improved your spending habits since the previous month.

How Do You Withdraw Via Chip?

Because Chip already connects to your bank account, withdrawing funds from your Chip account is incredibly straightforward. You click the Withdraw button and will be asked how much you want to withdraw. Once you enter an amount, the system will automatically withdraw that quantity to your bank account.

If you begin a withdrawal before 2 p.m. on a business day, the money will arrive in your bank account the same day. After 2 p.m. or on weekends, it will arrive the following business day. Remember that after money enters your Chip account, it may take 48 hours to clear so you can withdraw it. Any bonus money can take as long as a week to arrive in the account due to the longer processing time.

What Platforms Does Chip Support?

The Chip application is available for both Apple and Android devices via the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, respectively. The application is free to download and gives you access to all the features included in the program. The iPhone and Android apps both have full functionality, so you will not miss out on any features based on your mobile device.

How Does Chip Provide Security?

The funds that you save to your Chip account remain secure since the application works with partners that are fully regulated to use Barclays E-Wallet accounts. As such, the funds follow FCA regulation. Chip also has a data control license, and you can find the company on the ICO register.

As mentioned, you can withdraw the funds in your Chip account at any time, as the application stores it in an instant-access account that is in your name. Additionally, all the data that you use on Chip is protected with bank-grade security, specifically 256-bit encryption. To round it all out, Chip never stores any information that you provide.

What Type of Customer Support Does Chip Offer?

Chip’s customer support is built right into the mobile applications. You can use the live chat feature on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. for a quick response via the chat.

Conclusion

Chip is an application available for both Android and Apple devices that automatically transfers money from your bank account to a savings account. The transfers occur every few days, and the amounts depend on an algorithm that determines what you can spend.

The app is quite well designed but suffers from an annoying signup process, once you are past that in functions ok but remains in a messenger style format – some people will like this and some will not.

Chip works similarly to MoneyBox but that is the one I personally use, the interface is better and it has more options for investing your savings into an ISA where Chip is basically a mobile interface for a savings account.

Overall Chip is a novel way of getting people to start saving using technology at their fingertips. I think this is probably aimed at a younger audience who feel at home in their smartphone’s messenger apps and would like to start their journey into saving some extra money aside.

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Chip App

Ease of Use

7.0/10

Fees

9.0/10

Reputation

9.0/10

Customer Support

8.0/10

Design