OfferZen and Standard Bank to launch bank account for developers, Root
OfferZen, a tech recruitment company in South Africa, has teamed up with Standard Bank to launch a new bank account in 2018 – Root.
“Root is a lightweight bank account for developers that is accessible with code,” it says on the Root website. “Root is OfferZen’s experiment to open up the financial services world for software developers.”
The account comes with a mobile app, a programmable credit card, online banking interface and APIs.
Standard Bank will be the underlying banking service provider. It will also help developers to scale Root apps to the broader market. The bank says high potential applications developed in Root can be launched to all Standard Bank customers, through the bank’s dedicated API strategy.
“Root eliminates the barrier to entry for innovation in the financial sector,” OfferZen states. “It enables any software developer to build a fully functional fintech product without any special access to the banking world.
“Root’s cards are developer friendly, allowing a user to write code that interacts with transactions in real-time. Root hosts this code, called RootCode, securely in the cloud.
“Through RootCode and other APIs to the bank account, users can quickly build any feature they dream up and easily integrate with other services to expand their account’s functionality.”
Root is currently in beta version, with several RootCode apps, including:
- send their transaction data to a personal Google Sheet in real-time, to make budgeting easy;
- limit the days on which they can buy fast food, as part of a diet plan;
- create a dedicated card and budget for Uber rides.
“Root is like a 24x7x365 hackathon that allows any developer to build ‘life enabling’ apps or solutions,” explains John Campbell, head of Standard Bank EDGE.
“Instead of relying only on people who work for Standard Bank, we are giving any developer the power to create opportunities or solve everyday problems they experience.”
