Spriggy reduces authentication complexity with Twilio Verify for safer financial learning

Challenge

When family finance platform Spriggy wanted to scale, it needed a robust authentication solution that would enable it to continue protecting members’ accounts effectively and meet Australia’s stringent standards for financial services providers. 

Solution

Spriggy significantly reduced the complexity and cost of authenticating 1.2 million members’ accounts using Twilio Verify, achieving an 89–90% authentication attempt success rate. 

Financial literacy isn’t learnt in a classroom. It’s a life skill that requires conceptual understanding, decision-making and the positive influence of those around you. This is the idea behind Spriggy, an Australian company helping families raise money-smart kids. 

Spriggy’s platform offers a safe and enjoyable way for children to engage with real-world financial situations. Children learn about earning money by linking chores to pocket money, managing their finances using digital tools, setting savings goals and spending responsibly with prepaid cards, all while parents maintain complete oversight.

Spriggy’s platform has been embraced by 1.2 million members and the company takes that responsibility seriously. With both parents and children logging into the platform, maintaining strong security measures is essential. This includes following industry best practices to secure accounts, having strict protocols around access to members’ personal information, and proactively detecting and preventing fraud. Spriggy also needed a solution that could evolve alongside it, as it brought new features to market, like its SPRK product, designed specifically for teens. 

As a financial services provider in Australia, Spriggy also needed to ensure that it complies with the stringent standards of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) to safeguard sensitive data and financial systems, such as its CPS 234 framework.

Reducing the complexity and cost of authentication 

Spriggy has used Twilio’s solutions since its start-up days, including Twilio’s Programmable Messaging for member engagement and its initial authentication needs. This included implementing custom solutions for generating SMS one-time passwords (OTPs), limiting rates and monitoring fraud. So, when the company needed to upgrade to a simpler and more cost-effective authentication solution that would support it at scale, it was keen to continue working with Twilio.

“We anticipated when we were developing our new SPRK offering that managing our authentication services in-house would become increasingly complex and costly,” said Thompson. “We made a pivotal decision to transition to Twilio Verify, which allowed us to offload some of the more intricate and security-sensitive aspects of SMS authentication. 

“By integrating Twilio Verify, we significantly reduced the amount of code in the most critical paths of our user journeys – like onboarding and login – allowing us to focus on other areas of development,” Thompson added.

Twilio Verify now plays a central role at multiple member touchpoints, including account creation, logging in from new devices and virtual deployment. For instance, the company uses Twilio Verify for push provisioning in the SPRK app, enabling teenagers whose parents have completed a ‘know your customer’ check to instantly add their SPRK card to their Apple Wallet. This means they can start spending their pocket money directly without needing a physical card.

Improving authentication attempt success rates

Implementing Twilio Verify has been highly successful for Spriggy, which tracks the success rate of authentication attempts using the Twilio Verify dashboard. The company is achieving an 89–90% success rate – exceeding its target rate.

Tracking these metrics allows Spriggy to measure the effectiveness of its authentication over time and identify potential fraud trends. 

“We also use Twilio’s Alerts feature to alert us if there are an excessive number of failures or errors, which might provide an early indication of potential fraud activity,” said Thompson. “For instance, the system creates an alert when the number of errors in a certain time window exceeds a threshold, sending an email to the company’s on-call engineer.”  

The company also monitors its unit cost per verification attempt in real time via Twilio’s billing dashboards. 

Critically, Spriggy was able to achieve a greater return on investment using Twilio Verify than maintaining its custom solution. It has also helped reduce the overall complexity of the company’s processes.

Exploring emerging technologies that align with the needs of its user base

With security and user experience requirements continuing to evolve, Spriggy is exploring new technologies that align with its young, tech-savvy user base. 

“While user adoption of passkeys authentication has been slower than expected, we believe biometric-based solutions like Twilio Verify Passkeys will play a critical role in our broader authentication strategy,” said Thompson. “Especially as we introduce peer-to-peer authentication and ‘log me in’ features, where a parent can easily log their child into the app on another device.”

Spriggy is also excited by Silent Network Authentication, which could offer a safer login experience by reducing authentication errors and providing additional risk signals when it becomes available in Australia.

“We think this will allow us to reduce friction even further,” said Thompson. “Beyond this, we’re exploring tools like Twilio Lookup to enhance user experience, which has features such as Identity Match to reduce sign-up fraud.”