The incredible rise of the smartphone and customers demanding more personalized experiences has ushered in a new era in personal finance management.
Technology is helping us to become more financially aware
We’ve certainly come a long way from manually balancing the household chequebook. There are now a huge number of applications and platforms aimed at managing personal finances. At bunq, we believe that banks must take an active role in helping their users manage their money and integrate solutions into their account offering.
That’s why, as part of our latest update, we introduced the bunq Insights feature. The purpose of this is simple, we want people to be able to very easily understand and visualize their spending habits. We believe that when it comes to managing your personal finances, seeing how you spend and categorizing it is an incredibly important first step in reaching your savings goals.
Delivering this information in a way that is easy to understand is also key. Our users’ spending is displayed in a simple pie chart where you can see how much of your monthly outgoings are spent on things like groceries, travel, food and drink, shopping and subscriptions. In this way, you can easily determine which categories you spend the most money on and identify where savings can be made.
To deliver this service to our platform, we collaborate with Dateio to integrate their TapiX API into our platform. Dateio is an innovative Czech fintech dedicated to the principle of providing transparency to people’s finances.
Visualizing spending can help you save up to 10%
It’s a common scenario, pay day is approaching and you are scratching your head wondering how you’ve managed to spend so much this month. Without a mechanism to get a clear view of your spending habits, it’s easy to lose track of how you are spending against your monthly budget.
Banks should take the responsibility of delivering this valuable service to their users. However, it has not been implemented sufficiently across the industry particularly with the large incumbents. Dateio’s Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Ivan Dovica explains further; ''Banks offer to categorize and tag the transaction manually. But, if you are making the majority of your payments with a card, at the end of the day there can be dozens of transactions to be categorized or tagged. That is a lot of work. Based on millions of transactions processed every month we have developed processes and algorithms which categorize all transactions automatically, so customers don't have to take care of that.''
Having a platform which can help you visualize and categorize your spending can have a profound impact on your ability to save. Research from leading academics has suggested that simply seeing what you spend can help you to save up to 10%.
These types of interfaces are relatively new to the world of banking, and in order for them to be successful, a consistent stream of feedback is required. This helps to ensure that these concepts evolve in step with users expectations. Mr. Dovica adds, “Feedback is very important. Thanks to the feedback process, when customers tag a particular transaction as a different category according to his/her preferences, our system notices it and learns from it. That helps the categorization of the specific client as well as the whole client base, as we gather the feedback and improve the categorization on a macro scale.”
The idea of collaboration is a key part of the bunq philosophy. Our mission every day is to create a banking experience which people love to use and that means taking our community’s feedback seriously when making changes to the service.
As an entirely mobile bank, the pressures of innovating to match expectations is something that we thrive under. The mobile revolution has made a massive impact on society both in the way we communicate but also the rate at which we want our needs to be met. This is something that our partners at Dateio clearly agree on.
{{blog-cta-5-minutes="/blog-cta/5-minutes"}}
“Modern society got used to beautiful experiences through their smartphones. Now, they expect this even in their banking apps. Beautiful, easy-to-use, convenient banking that makes their life better.” concludes Mr. Dovica.
{{blog-cta-5-minutes="/blog-cta/5-minutes"}}
