Automation and insights are driving the direction of new products at Stash, the investment platform turned banking fintech, said Chief Product Officer Sudev Balakrishnan at the Bank Innovation Build conference last week.

Currently in testing with customers on a limited basis is an expansion of Stock-Back, a rewards program launched in mid-2019 that offers customers fractional shares of stocks as purchase rewards when they use the Stash debit card.

The expansion, called “Stock-Back Card Boost,” sets customers up to automatically invest in the places they spend with their Stock-Back card, Balakrishnan said. By opting into the expansion, customers will receive Stock-Back rewards, plus every qualifying transaction is rounded up using spare change from the customer’s Stash banking account, backed by Green Dot Bank. The rounded-up amount is automatically invested either in a matching stock or the customer’s default ETF.

The idea is to leverage automation in the psychological sense, Balakrishnan said, by automating the decision-making process and having those decisions create benefit over time. He did not provide a timeline for the full launch of the program.

Stock-Back Card Boost is the next step in the evolution of the Stock-Back rewards program, which leverages consumer brand loyalty to encourage customers to become comfortable with the idea of investing. The goal of Stock-Back is to bridge the gap between consumers’ daily lives and the investing world, and it’s a mechanism Stash uses to familiarize its customer base with investing, the idea of stocks and the language.

Separately, New York-based Stash also launched a new feature to provide customers with grocery-based insights about six weeks ago, Balakrishnan said. The feature provides customers month-to-month insights for their spending. The new tool and corresponding data has prompted Stash to explore how this month-to-month data can be used to make Stock-Back even more relevant to customers, based on their spending habits.

The 5-year-old Stash has more than 4.3 million customers and has raised more than $300 million in venture funding to date, according to Crunchbase.