Our mission at Petal is to make lives easier with access to credit that is honest, simple, and accessible. With that mission in mind, the Petal team has been creating features that help members stay on top of their finances since our early days. A few highlights:
- We offer an interest calculator on our app’s payment screen that shows the estimated future interest change associated with paying less than the full balance — easily understood in dollars, not percents.
- We launched Spend Planner, a feature in the Petal app that discourages overspending by empowering members to set a monthly budget for themselves and then track their spending against that budget. This might not sound particularly revolutionary, but consider it against the context of traditional credit card companies and their orientation towards overconsumption, overspending and ultimately over-borrowing. At Petal, we made the conscious decision to align our interests with those of members and intentionally side with transparency and long-term financial success.
- To see a full list of Petal app features that enable members to be more aware of their finances, click here.
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of a new section in the Petal app that will further increase the transparency around members’ financial lives. We call it Insights, and it is composed of three new widgets: Spend Chart, Top Merchants, and Top Categories.
With Spend Chart, members can more easily track the total amount they spent each month over time. Similar to how the Health App has made users more conscious of their daily activity, we believe that Spend Chart will make members more aware of of the months in which they spent more than, less than, or at their respective budgets.