Open almost any money app and you will find a line like this in the footer: "Banking services provided by our partner institution."
Most people scroll past it. It is the single most important sentence on the page.
The app is usually not the bank
Building a financial app and being licensed to hold people's money are two completely different things. The first takes engineers. The second takes regulatory capital, a compliance function, audited controls, and permission from a regulator that can take it away.
So most fintech companies do the first and partner with a firm that has already done the second. The app you touch is built by a technology company. The money sits with a licensed institution behind it.
This is a legitimate and well-established structure. It is how a great many financial apps work. But it has a consequence people are rarely told plainly: your legal relationship for the regulated service is with the partner, not with the app.
Three questions that tell you what you need to know
1. Who is actually holding my money?
Find the name. It should be on the website, and it should appear before you open an account. If you cannot find it, that is itself informative.
2. Are they a bank, or an electronic money institution?
This distinction decides what protects you, and the two are not the same thing.
| Bank | Electronic money institution | |
|---|---|---|
| What your balance is | A deposit | Electronic money |
| FSCS protection | Yes, eligible deposits up to £85,000 | No |
| What protects it instead | FSCS, plus the bank's own capital rules | Safeguarding — customer funds held separately from the firm's own |
| Pays interest | Can do | No |
Safeguarding is a real protection. It requires customer money to be kept apart from the firm's own money, so that if the firm fails, those funds are intended to be returned to customers ahead of other creditors.
But it is not the FSCS. It is not a government guarantee. Recovery in an insolvency can be partial, and it can be slow.
3. What happens if something goes wrong?
Who handles the complaint — the app or the partner? Can you take it to an ombudsman, and if so, which one? For a UK-authorised firm the answer is usually the Financial Ombudsman Service. For an unauthorised technology company, its own conduct generally falls outside that scheme.
The thing people get wrong about investing
FSCS investment protection, where it applies, covers the failure of the firm — if an authorised firm collapses and cannot return assets it was holding for you.
It does not cover your investment going down in value.
No scheme, in any country, protects you against a market falling. If an investment drops 30%, that loss is yours.
This is worth internalising, because the two ideas get blurred together constantly — sometimes carelessly, sometimes deliberately.
Why we are writing this about ourselves
Shuttlevest Limited is a technology company. We are not a bank, and we are not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. When we offer regulated services, they will be provided by licensed partners, and your relationship for those services will be with them.
We have not named our partners yet, because the agreements are not signed. When they are, we will publish each firm's legal name, its regulator, its licence number and a direct link to the public register — so you can check it yourself rather than taking our word for it.
We would rather tell you this clearly now than let you assume something more flattering and find out later.
If you want the full detail, it is all set out on our regulatory information page. It is not a short read, and it is not supposed to be.