Hi there,
I am still looking for a short and descriptive name for my idea but bear with me and I’ll try to describe it.
The current way that monzo seems to present our accounts to us involves the concept of pots, available to spend , etc. so it’s suitable for most folks who are not into extreme budgeting. And it is very different from organizational concepts by N26 or Revolut for example. With the goal being - as i understand it - to provide users with the most transparent and beneficial way to understand their finances.
But what if I could choose the philosophy by which my money is organized by simply selecting one of many Organizational Profiles available to me. For example one could be the YNAB profile, where pots are not simply stashes of money but some kind of sub-accounts where money spent is deducted from allocated funds in categories (similar but not the same to pots). Or I choose a plain profile where none of these concepts exist and all I get is just my recent transaction history.
These profiles could be maintained by third party providers or by communities in an open-source project. It would involve code that has to be certified or restricted into a kind of management sandbox that makes it impossible to code malevolent functions on the platform.
Currently one still can find an app that implements a certain organization profile and uses an online banking API directly. But I think for monzo it could be very interesting to integrate such apps. Because with these apps you have to trust them but with monzo embedded sandbox profiles you dont have to since monzo can check every outgoing transaction before it is executed. Portability and perfect integration with a banks other functionalities could be another benefit of this model. The api might describe user elements and processes which can be orchestrated by the profile code and so the profile code coulde be run on a smart phone or the monzo website too.
I hope I could describe my idea sufficiently. My motivation is that at the moment choosing between monzo, n26, revolut etc. for me also depends very much on the organizational profiles they provide. With organizational profiles I chose a bank first and then choose the way I organize my money.
Cheers,
Marc