Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Just two big predictions from me:

1) FinTech will start to shine through, the first consumer banks built using modern tech will open to customers in Europe (London FinTech scene is strong, Zurich has ex-Googlers and strong finance, or Frankfurt but they are currently trailing - my bet is on London). These banks will experience very strong growth, the question really is: Will they go with it or go for acquisition

2) The "Family Plan" will emerge as a new sales market in most of the established consumer products, with Dropbox, Google, and others all building strong offerings for managing the product use and sharing of a group of users. This is ground-work for centralising both "family" and "home", and lays the foundation for the command and control of IoT over the next few years - it is how the big established players stay in the game.

Neither of those predictions is quite there, the leading new bank is Mondo https://getmondo.co.uk/ but it's in beta, is currently iPhone only which limits adoption in the UK, and the benefits of the new tech hasn't yet been fully realised.

And I'm not yet seeing the "family plan" head this way but I'd be surprised if the penny doesn't drop somewhere and this be the path taken. Control of the home is control of the family, and vice versa... the family want tools for this better than the ones they have today.

An entirely different thing I'd like to see exist but do not know of anyone working on at all:

3) A dating app that acknowledges the hook-up culture that seems to be growing in the millenial generation of users, and instead of hiding that under the carpet uses it's data to encourage responsible tracking of STDs and other risks.

That one is inspired by news this morning on Gonorrhoea becoming immune to antibiotics http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35153794 . The app should function similar to whatever the core function of Tinder is, but allow tracking of whom you've done what with for the sole purpose of allowing notifications of STDs to be quickly disseminated to people who may be exposed.

It may be infeasible, I don't know what the willingness of those who do hook-ups is to track risk-related activity and test results is. The core idea is "disease tracking in social networking and dating apps".

On the banking thing. In NL we have Bunq which is a virtual bank with banking license. It combines social with banking. The idea is nice but I'm not sure if the world is ready yet. https://www.bunq.com/en/

Nice.

I like that they have one of the things I anticipate will emerge "Instantly switch your debit card between accounts".

I hope to see features that allow the management of accounts by splitting an account into virtual buckets, allowing transactions from frequent providers to be tagged/labelled in some way.

Or even to map retailers/companies such that "transactions from them are bills and are always associated with this account", even though you only carry the one debit card it will act intelligently as simply a payment card and you would have control over where the money actually comes from.

Can you elaborate on what is the value proposition/differentiator for such a "new tech" consumer bank? I'm not following this sector closely and are curious about what's brewing.

The traditional banks have very slow systems, and those prevent a lot of new scenarios.

For example:

* When travelling, you could use a mobile app to receive instant notification of every payment made, which helps you manage your fraud risk when abroad (temporarily block the card if you see something suspect, whilst allowing you to whitelist for specific transactions so your card actually still works).

* You could have control over the "routing" of your finances... designate payments as bills and have them come out of a different account than the one you use for disposable income.

* You could split payments, go for a meal and one person pays and then agree to split and the payments are auto-managed amongst those who were there (similar to Ubers split fare)

* You could have better budgeting and management of finances, better reporting, as the banks could run the equivalent of "Google ID" (Google have this for phone number recognition) for payments so that transactions are automatically tagged and managed.

* You could have dynamic control of spending limits, set alerts and controls that follow your normal pattern to really increase fraud prevention measures, whilst your app would allow you instant control when you need to make purchases outside of that pattern.

Really it's about putting consumers in control of their money in all ways.

Banks are horribly slow, and the slowness removes all control.

Edit: I should add, there is a driving force behind this in Europe: Contactless card payments.

In Europe we've had contactless "touch" payments for several years, they are ubiquitous and can be used for any payment below £30. They are now so common that most people I know carry no cash at all, they simply touch their debit cards and the transaction is done in seconds.

This has led to very noisy bank accounts, where a bank account used to have fewer than 50 transactions per month: bills + cash withdrawals, the bank accounts now have almost every transaction: a stick of chewing gum, a sandwich from Pret, a coffee in the morning.

The greater the noise, the more speed and control are real benefits to the consumer.

So generally mint.com as a bank instead of as an app for an existing bank ?

One could view it that way.

But the key thing is speed. Instant notification and control. Mint.com is just a layer over it at the end, rather than real-time control.

mint is massively limited simply because it isn't a bank.

https://www.moneydashboard.com/ Is a very nice to to this in the UK at least. It isn't perfect but its much better than things I've tried in the past.

On the other hand, traditional banks can easily copy all these features if they become important to customers. I'm not sure they can be long-term differentiators - unless software patents, which fortunately here in Europe are much less strong than in the US - and I don't see any network effect to give the first mover a strong advantage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com