POSB Smart Buddy Programme

A contactless payments ecosystem to cultivate sensible savings and spending habits among young students in an interactive, engaging manner.

Innovation presentation

Global first POSB Smart Buddy programme

A contactless payments ecosystem within the school to help cultivate sensible savings and spending habits among young students in an interactive & engaging manner. It revolutionizes how money is handled by digitizing the end to end journey. Its accompanying Smart Buddy mobile app allows parents to remotely manage their children’s spending and savings, while empowering students to monitor their own finances.

Powered digitising savings and expenditure behaviour

The POSB Smart Buddy programme uses a portable and wearable watch for a contactless payment capability.

Parents link their savings account with the mobile application and effectively manage their child’s spending by setting a daily allowance limit in advance. They can also track their child’s expenses and savings in real- time via the accompanying application. Furthermore, parents can choose to automatically transfer the accumulated savings into their child’s POSBkids account, helping their children to cultivate a saving habit from a younger age in a digital and relevant way.

Take up rate for schools

Since the launch of the Smart Buddy Programme, the take up rate in schools is at a 60-70% high and increasing as the days go by. As more children get their hands on the Smart Buddy Watch, word will spread and this will help drive up the take up rate.

Uniqueness of the project

1st Globally

DBS Bank Ltd is the 1st bank in the world to launch the POSB Smart Buddy programme, a digital device which enables a student to spend and save electronically and monitor their finances digitally with the accompanying POSB Smart Buddy app.

Direct Debiting

Existing payment solutions out in the market are on a top up basis. This gives rise to an issue where consumers have to top up their payment device. The Smart Buddy eradicates this issue by linking the wearable to a savings account and is directly debited from the account once a transaction is made.

Security

The Smart Buddy Application has a disable account function to tackle the issue of loss of wearables. Children sometimes could mistakenly misplace their wearable and thus this disable function can be easily enabled again should they recovery their watch. Additionally, the watch can be personalised as well via the syncing through the application.