86 400 picking up thousands of customer bills in latest campaign

Australia’s first smartbank, 86 400, has launched a new 16-week campaign to give back to its early customers by paying over 100 upcoming bills at random each week. The ‘Pay It Forward’ campaign will see the bank settle nearly 2,000 customer bills in total, covering everything from Spotify subscriptions to health insurance and utility bills, regardless of the bank they’ve been paid from.

By connecting other bank accounts to the 86 400 app using the smartbank’s Connected Accounts feature, customers not only get total visibility of their money, but better sight of all their regular bill payments and upcoming subscriptions in the ‘Coming Up’ tile on the app home screen. Each week, over 100 lucky customers will be selected at random to have one of these predicted bills credited to their account.

The campaign will be supported with paid media and social media amplification, intended to drive advocacy and word-of-mouth referrals. Lucky customers will be notified by SMS and email and can win an 86 400 merch pack by sharing via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, using the hashtag #86400payitforward and tagging @86400smartbank.

Travis Tyler, Chief Product and Marketing Officer, 86 400, said: “As a new bank, advocacy is incredibly important to us and we’re constantly looking for ways to delight and give back to our early and loyal customers, whether that’s through new products like Energy Switch, features to help save them money, or 86 400 merch they can wear out and about.”

“Paying bills is an important but unenjoyable task for most of us, and with this campaign we wanted to use one our most popular and talked-about features, Coming Up bill prediction, to challenge that.”

How 86 400 customers can get involved: 

• To be eligible, you just need to be a customer of 86 400 and have bills appear in the ‘Coming Up’ tile on the homescreen.
• To have a bill appear in the ‘Coming Up’ tile, either connect your other bank accounts to the 86 400 app or make payments from your 86 400 accounts and your regular bills and subscriptions will be automatically predicted and appear in the tile.
• Each predicted bill due in the next week and valued between $5 and $100 will be automatically entered into the weekly draw
• The more bills and payments appearing in your app, the more chances you have to get one credited
• Download via the Apple App store or Google Play and open an account in just two minutes.

Emma Smith, Marketing Lead, 86 400, said: “Pay It Forward is our way of saying thanks to our amazing customers. We want them to feel in control of their money, which is why we’ve created a campaign that supercharges our bills prediction feature to put money back in their pockets. This isn’t something you might expect from a bank, but we could all use a little act of kindness in our lives right now.”

Travis Tyler continued, “Over the coming months we’ll be continuing to add to our ‘Coming Up’ feature, improving the algorithm to predict more spending patterns, detect more bills and subscriptions and deliver further insights to help more customers stay on top of their regular expenses. While we eventually intend to make bill shock a thing of the past, we’re hoping these random acts of kindness give lucky customers some much-needed bill delight in the meantime.”