Hi, have added some offline accounts just now. Couple of things from the experience…
I have added the offset account connected to my mortgage with Chelsea BS. But they are not listed as an institution.
Secondly (haven’t checked this but I don’t think it exists) if I want to update the balance, I might want to open the bank’s app - have a link in the update page to open the app.
Thirdly, for example for a Marcus savings account, as well as the interest rate, also have a field for the basis of interest calculation and interest credit, and then Snoop can provide a better estimate of balance. Add a field indicating the last manual update date/balance. Not worked out what the interest rate field is used for so far.
Pete
Pete
Hi @ricochet we do have an option to pick any provider who is not on our standard list at the bottom of the page, but I’ve now also added ‘Chelsea Building Society’ to this list and it should appear in the app now.
We can’t do the ‘opening the bank’s app’ from within our app because banks and other app providers don’t publish an address (equivalent to a URL that you’d use in a website) that a mobile app uses to make our app know how to ‘find’ the app on your device. For apps we control we can create short cuts between them and for things like the Open Banking connection process, each bank publishes a very specific URL that will make their process start. That doesn’t exist more generally for any other app that we don’t have a connection process with.
Thank you for your third suggestion. Currently the interest rate is just captured for customer convenience so they have the information in one place. We don’t do any balance forecasting on offline accounts and we only ever show the balances a customer has added.
Paul
Thanks for the reply and for adding Chelsea BS to the list.
For the linking I started from the observation that Amazon’s app gets started on my phone when I click on most links in their emails, so some apps and some places where you can click links do do this.
I appreciate that this may not be true for all apps or platforms, and that in the general case encouraging people to click on links to fina cial institutions is not necessarily a good idea.
For the third point it would also be nice to be able to identify a transaction to or from a connected account and automatically also update balance based on that. If you captured account info it would be explicit, but you could also use info on the transaction (the ref maybe) to do this without.
Finally. If you could do that for savings, then why not also for loans and mortgages?
Amazon can do that because they control their emails and their app… hence they can make their email always ‘deep link’ into their own app. When we send out emails we do the same - opening links directly in our app. Generally speaking, it’s not possible to open someone else’s app.
That data is not robust enough in Open Banking transaction descriptions to know which account this relates to in an offline account. Many transactions that go into savings accounts are not based on fixed transaction descriptions and we’ve have no way to match a specific string of text to an account. Also for things like savings accounts, we’d have no way of knowing when things like interest is getting applied to the balance and exactly how that is being calculated. So we’d end-up not reporting an accurate balance.
Automatically updating balances for lending products would be even less accurate because although we might see a repayment towards the credit amount leave a connected account, we’d have no sight of any interest or fees that are getting applied in that mortgage/loan etc.
Hence we leave it to the customer to track an accurate balance rather than us trying to guess. Obviously our main desire is that more and more accounts get added to the scope of Open Banking so these offline accounts become less and less used.
Paul
Okay understand about the app thing now - pits there isn’t a standard for this.
Bitwarden (password manager) does a tolerably good job of connecting web and app logins - don’t kn ow if there is anything in what they do that might help here.
I was not necessarily expecting automated detection of transactions to offline accounts - but if you captured some info in the setup, those transactions could be spotted. E.g. transfers to premium bonds are to a particular sort code and account number with a ref of your own account identifier - a transaction with those details must be to buy premium bonds. Transfers out have particular properties around the ref.
Alternatively, I give transfers between my own accounts helpful references - “from Marcus” so that when it lands I can tell where it came from - if I could set up a filter for that, then it would know that the transaction would have reduced the balance in the marcus account.
For the interest question, I was suggesting capturing the basis of interest calculation (e.g. calculated daily) and credit (e.g. credited on the 7th of each month), and, crucially, this is then used to calculate and show an estimated balance in that account, and, in the absence of a way to actually trigger a visit to the app then at least a reminder on the day interest is credited to visit the app and record the current balance.
At the moment if I set up a periodic update on an offline account I can only set one up that changes the balance, not to remoind me to update the balance myself.
Thanks @ricochet - Password managers store URLs for the sites in question. This can be done for websites but they can’t as easily open mobile apps (unless the app provider does a redirect from their own website to their app for example).
Thanks for your suggestions on how we could do more with offline accounts and transaction rules. We don’t currently have any plans to introduce something like this but I understand the feedback.
Paul
(Edited original post to make it clear it’s not ‘as easy’ to open a 3rd party app)
Bitwarden, for android apps, stores a URL like the following, for Etsy:
androidapp://com.etsy.android
And can launch the app using that.
I don’t know how it does that - I tried just putting that into a browser address bar, wondering if there was a special handler for ‘androidapp’, but it doesn’t work. But it derived that URL from the app itself when you add the password record, so there is a mechanism to launch an app.
It also, if you are using the app and a website, often spots that the login for one might apply to the other, so there is an additional bit of smarts in there that is, I guess, based on the URL of the site, but the app launcher bit is not.
That’s right @ricochet - that’s the linking I mention earlier which is similar to what we do on our emails (and Amazon do in your original example).
The link you’ve provided is an Android specific link to the Etsy app. For this to work, someone would have had to find out what the Etsy app is called behind the scenes and then if you are using an Android device where that app is installed, it should open the app.
There are lots of different ways to make this work across iOS and Android. See this article if you are interested.
The issue is that you need to know the name/address of each app involved across both Google and Apple. This is something that can be manually obtained with a bit of effort. It’s not as simple as just called www.etsy.com in the example above.
Sorry I was probably being over-simplistic above to suggest it’s not at all technically possible. You’d need to be able to work out what each app is named that you want to link to and all you could do is ask the device to ‘open’ the app (not link to specific content like you can do if you control the app yourself). You’d need to maintain a register of all app names - for both iOS and Android and make your content link to these. So that bit would be technically possible - but with a lot of manual effort and you’d have no control on the results.
Paul