The social media feed... for all your finances
CUSTOMER insights company EY Seren runs an ‘innovation centre for open banking’.
It road-tests new ideas on real people on behalf of financial companies or start-ups and invited me to its hub to see examples of how open banking could work in practice.
At the centre, consumers are watched from a separate room and their reactions – positive or negative – are fed back to those companies.
So financial firms know straightaway if an app idea is a hit or miss. Here are some examples of how it works:
FINANCIAL FACEBOOK
Seren calls it ‘my financial storyline’. It is a way of presenting account history so it reads like a social media feed. One app opens a dashboard view of all your accounts and shows what you spend and where. Budgeting tools are a tap away.
And in the same way you can share photos online with one person or a group, you can share savings goals. For example, if you and a partner are saving towards a holiday, you can both see how much the other is putting aside.
ALEXA FOR BANKING
Fans of Amazon’s Echo Dot will be used to asking virtual assistant ‘Alexa’ to turn on a favourite radio station using just
their voice, rather than tuning a radio themselves. Or perhaps you use Apple’s assistant Siri.
Now meet Alexa’s little sister ‘Livia’ – a financial virtual assistant. In future you could ask Alexa or Siri to ‘speak’ to Livia to find out your account balance or transfer money. Or ask Livia to find you a savings account. Livia could busy herself with this task by ‘reading’ your bank account history and finding money based on how much you can afford to put away each month. You could even ask her to open the account for you.
There is work to be done on security so this remains a future possibility. In the meantime, Bank of Scotland is trialling a virtual assistant in its banking app that can answer frequently asked questions in conversation.
APPSTORE FOR OPEN BANKING
Apple iPhone or iPad users can find apps to help with everyday life in the AppStore – everything from banking to live train information. Similarly, there is room for a company to design a trusted ‘financial feature marketplace’. This is where people can go on their smartphones to find financial apps that are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
VERDICT
There is real potential to improve financial lives. Data will be filtered quickly at the touch of a button, so we can make more profitable or prudent decisions at speed.
This could attract people who previously had no time to better their finances. Those who never realised they were being ripped off might see for the first time how switching would benefit them.
Many will only join in once new technology sits seamlessly in the background. In other words, let someone else jump first. People will also need to be alert as scams evolve.