Kaldi Review: Cashback and ultra-cheap investing makes this new app a new favourite

Kaldi is a digital wallet with a built-in payment app and investment platform. It's been designed specifically to show younger people that when you get into the savings habit - and when you invest those savings - your long-term financial goals don't have to remain out of reach.

Kaldi does this in a really smart way, by linking two things: cashback rewards on your everyday spending; and investment funds. Kaldi's founders have stated that what they want to prove is that for 'Generation Doom Spend', there are benefits to investing even small amounts. It's a clever approach that is well done overall.

There's an impressive list of linked retailers, including the likes of Amazon, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Aldi, Asda, IKEA, Adidas and Costa, which means you can pretty much assume that wherever you're spending your money, Kaldi is accepted. What's more, unlike with credit cards (which is where you usually find cashback offered as an incentive), there's no need to risk building up debt here to achieve savings.

You will need to pre-load cash (so treat it like a pre-pay card) because it's not a bank account, and the transfers didn't always land in my Kaldi account immediately, which means you need to be prepared in advance. The app can be used to buy in-store or online, and there's mention of a physical card coming in the future too.

You can also activate automated round-ups - which allows you to round your purchases up to the nearest pound and pop the difference into your Kaldi account as savings and add to your investments. A few other providers, including Monzo, Starling and Revolut offer automatic round-ups on spending. However, very few providers (outside of credit cards) also offer cashback on spending. You'll get it on some of the paid-for plans with Revolut, and Chase offers 1% on everyday spending but it's capped at £15 per month. Kaldi is free to open, the account is free to use, and the cashback rates are excellent - 2.5% on all in-store shopping at Tesco, for example, and 1% for shopping on Amazon.

Kaldi is very much driven towards investing those saved pennies and pounds. And the investment services have been well-designed around the needs of a younger client, who is new to investing. There's a choice of either a General investment account (GIA) is an account designed to provide access to investments. You may be liable for tax on any income or capital gains earned within a general investment account but this can be a useful vehicle for anyone who has maxed out their ISA allowanceGeneral Investment Account, Sometimes called an investment ISA, a stocks and shares ISA is an individual savings account that allows you to invest in shares, unit trusts, investment funds, and bonds. You will not need to pay tax on any income or capital gains earned on investments within an ISAStocks and Shares ISA, and Junior ISAs (Individual Savings Accounts) (JISAs) are tax-free savings accounts for children under the age of 18. Only a parent can open a JISA but anyone can contribute. You can choose to save for your children through either a cash Junior ISA where you will earn interest on any cash in the account, or a stocks and shares Junior ISA where you will invest your child’s savings on their behalfJunior ISA. ISAs should always be your first thought when investing as you can put in up to £20,000 per year for a Stocks and Shares ISA (it's £9,000 for Junior ISAs) and all income and gains generated by those investments can be saved and spent without you ever needing to pay any income or capital gains tax. The fact that Kaldi also offers a Junior ISA is excellent, as it's an ideal tax-free vehicle to start saving for your child's future. You can invest from just £1 too, which makes it accessible to everyone. And there's the option for you to gift your cashback savings to others, which means you could benefit from grandparents or other kindly relatives and friends adding to that Junior ISA with their gifted cashback and savings too.

It's a shame there's no Lifetime ISA, as that could be an ideal investment account to link into for those trying to save for a house deposit, as the government adds 25% to everything you save.

When it comes to what to invest in, there are no individual stocks and shares to pick with Kaldi, just a choice of 10 investment funds. But they are popular funds from some of the world's leading asset managers, including Vanguard and Fidelity, and there are choices that will suit different risk appetites as well as HSBC's Islamic fund. There are a couple of Tracker funds are ‘passive’ investments as they simply aim to mirror the performance of a benchmark, such as the FTSE 100. They are run by computer algorithms rather than fund managers, so they're cheaper than actively managed funds, but still ensure you get a diversified portfolio. A tracker can never outperform the market or index it is linked to – it will only ever follow it. An Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) is an example of a tracker fund.tracker funds in there too, which are nice low-cost options that follow the market rather than try to outperform it. Ten funds will be too limiting for experienced investors, but that's not who Kaldi is designed for. And the lack of choice prevents overwhelm which is something we know stops new starters from ever getting into investing.

It's a nicely designed app, although not yet quite as slick as the likes of Monzo and Revolut. But it's very early days for Kaldi and some of the annoyances, like needing to leave the app to load cash in, aren't a reason to give up the opportunity for the easy-wins you can gain when it comes to saving.

Kaldi's pricing and excellent cashback offering would have scored them higher if the customer service wasn't so limited at the moment. I know it's often the price we pay for low-cost, but no phone support, no instant in-app-chat, and up to 2 days for the message service to reply could be frustrating. That said, my enquiry was replied to in a matter of hours, and it was a very helpful response, so I wasn't actually left waiting 2 days.

Who will Kaldi suit? Those who are trying to grow their money through good habits and easy wins, those who are at the start of their investing journey, and those who don't have masses of spare cash at their disposal but still want to invest and grow for the future.