To be a responsible and healthy business, we need to be profitable and at Tembo, our aim is to align our business model with your success. Here’s how:

The Tembo subscription fee
We charge Tembo Plus customers £2 per month for access to our app. This helps us cover some of the costs of offering Tembo each month, such as performing checks to verify your identity and making sure you’re getting the best ideas to get your home sooner.

Cash accounts
We place our customers’ money with UK registered banks for safekeeping. There’s a lot of work involved in partnering with banks and managing the inflows and outflows of money to meet customer needs (we call this our treasury function). In some circumstances Tembo will receive interest on this money and we’ll pay interest out to customers at a different, but fair, rate.

Investment accounts, aka: stocks & shares
If you invest through Tembo, we’ll apply an annual charge of 0.35% of the value of your account. This helps to cover the costs of providing access to our investment solutions. Investment funds also have their own charging structure, which you can find out more about in the app. The fund we offer currently charges 0.17% per year.

Referral rebates
If we help you get a new service or better deal, say save you money on your energy bills, and we receive a fee or commission for this, we’ll be up front and tell you how much at the time. This is to cover the costs of setting this up and running this service. After costs, we’ll then look to share any profit with you.

That’s it, the full story of how we make money. There’s no hidden sources and if you have any questions, hit us up.

We’ll never sell your data. We keep it safe by locking it up with enterprise-level encryption and use it to provide services to you, like savings and investment accounts and ideas that benefit you.

Using data for good Customer data use gets a bad rep in the press, and often it should. Some companies suck in vast amounts of personal data and use it for the wrong reasons, but we believe there’s another way and that it’s important to be on the same team as you, our customers.

If you give us consent to access your bank transactions, or provide us with information about your finances, we’ll use your data to provide you with ideas to help you buy your home quicker and easier. We can’t change anything on your account.

Our aim is to motivate you to reach your goals faster. To do this, we also anonymise and combine your bank transaction data with other customers’ data to show you average levels of income and spending. This lets you compare your spending and saving against the average Tembo user, which gives you a rough idea of whether you’re smashing the plastic or smashing your goals.

Third parties We can’t build the entire financial system from scratch (much as we’d like to). This means we have to partner with other companies to deliver the full enchilada. We put in place the necessary agreements with partners and seek to ensure they have the policies, procedures and technology in place to protect your interests and that they only access the information they need, nothing more. We bring as few outside suppliers into the loop as possible.

People at Tembo We only give access to the people who absolutely need to have access to your data, no one else. It’s held strictly on a need-to-know basis. In relation to bank transaction data, our CEO can’t even see it. Some data is anonymised (meaning it can’t be clearly linked back to you) and those who have access are vetted and trained in best practices. We have a policy that allows us to access your identity and your data, but only in special circumstances and with very good reason.

So, if you’ve read our privacy policy (aka: how we gather, manage and use data) to the very end, the short answer is this: we use data to help you, we’ll never sell it or even think about selling it, and we keep it as safe as we can.

While taking on the huge generational wealth imbalance, and helping as many young people as possible get their first home, there’s a number of tricky decisions to make. It’s a constant balancing act, but we feel it’s important in this instance to talk about how we weigh up making the best investment return possible and caring about the world we live in.

Given our values, including fairness and giving a sh*t, if you opt to invest through Tembo (instead of saving in cash) you’ll be offered access to sustainable funds. This is so you can invest in getting towards your first home and at the same time, help make a better future for our home planet. Remember that investing is intended to be a long term option, and the value of your portfolio can go down as well as up.

Okay, so what do you mean by sustainable funds?

Sometimes called ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing, it means that when making decisions about which companies and assets to invest in, the fund manager takes into consideration the investment’s impact on climate change, natural resources, social opportunities and corporate behaviour. This is balanced with aiming to make a healthy financial return.

Concepts like sustainable, ethical and responsible investing are constantly evolving and developing in the investment world. It’s an emotive topic and often the meaning of words like ‘responsible’, ‘ethical’ and ‘sustainable’ to one person is different to another. We think it’s important to be transparent and acknowledge that what we’re offering won’t be everyone’s perfect solution to sustainable investing, but we think it’s a step in the right direction. If, for any reason, what we offer doesn’t fit with what you’re looking for, we won’t judge.

We’ve scoured the market to find investment options that have the right balance between cost, expected return and taking into account ESG factors. The BlackRock My Map 5 Select ESG Fund came out on top. We also have a team assembled to make sure we keep offering great sustainable fund options.