MSE Poll: How do you rate your banks' apps?

Never downloaded the apps.

Don't all the apps do what you need them to do?
See balance, allow you to do transfers and pay people, look at direct debits and set up standing orders?
What else does the app need to do?

ozaz wrote: »

I'll comment based on some features of the Monzo app that are superior to regular banking apps, but I think Starling has basically the same features.

• Real-time transaction lists and notifications (no waiting several hours before a transaction gets added)
• Much better information on each transaction than regular apps/statements (e.g. recognizable names instead of hard-to-decipher merchant codes; potentially useful metadata like location of purchase). EDIT: "Better information" might not be the right term here. But the information is certainly presented to you in a much better way.
• Spending analytics (e.g. how much money you have spent in different categories of items; how much you have spent at a particular merchant)
• Budgeting tools (e.g. how much you are projected to have left at the end of the month based on spending patterns)
• Ability to add notes and receipts to transactions
• Ability to temporarily freeze the card within the app if you think you may have lost it

1st one, yeah it sometimes takes a day to go on so I could potentially see the advantage of that, but I guess the question is why do the other banks wait a day to add transactions? I thought it was down to when the merchant sent its data through therefore out of the banks hands, but clearly I am wrong if one bank can do it instantly.

Hmm, how does it know what category each spend is in? Does it have like a list of shops or something?

Not sure I get the budget thing based on what it thinks you will spend... I don't tend to have regular spending from my current account apart from SO to other accounts at the beginning of the month.

The only thing I would be interested in is to how they can show transactions in real time. Only things I can see on my bank instantly are transfers and cash withdrawals.

indesisiv wrote: »

1st one, yeah it sometimes takes a day to go on so I could potentially see the advantage of that, but I guess the question is why do the other banks wait a day to add transactions? I thought it was down to when the merchant sent its data through therefore out of the banks hands, but clearly I am wrong if one bank can do it instantly.

Hmm, how does it know what category each spend is in? Does it have like a list of shops or something?

Not sure I get the budget thing based on what it thinks you will spend... I don't tend to have regular spending from my current account apart from SO to other accounts at the beginning of the month.

The only thing I would be interested in is to how they can show transactions in real time. Only things I can see on my bank instantly are transfers and cash withdrawals.

This article at the following link provides the best explanation I can find of how they can show notifications in real-time: https://monzo.com/blog/2015/12/02/3-second-sandwich/
FYI, it was written when Monzo had a different name (Mondo)

The article makes it sound like the IT systems of traditional banks are simply not designed to make use of real-time data. The "How is Mondo different?" section of the article is how they augment the data on each transaction and I assume this feeds into auto-categorisation. Categories can then be adjusted by the user and the user preference is learned by the app.

I don't really use the budget thing but its there. Most people are creatures of habit so I wouldn't be surprised if projected spending patterns get fairly accurate after a few months of use for people who do all their spending on the card. I expect more budgeting tools will be added with time.

The reason I started using Monzo was the real-time notifications/transaction logging. I wanted to switch from mainly cash-based day-to-day spending to using mainly contactless payments and Monzo facilitated this. Without instant logging of transactions in my statement/spending-feed I suspect it would be hard to keep track of contactless spending on a day-to-day basis.