Direct Debits pot proof of concept

Great thread @Frankiejr

We were actually talking over lunch about how we could schedule money to come out of pots. Both regularly (based on time) and based on events.

There’s a couple of things we want to do, and a few we’d want to avoid…

1/ Pots don’t have sortcode-account numbers, so no direct debits can come from them directly.
2/ It’d be nice if a transaction could be redirected to a pot based on some kind of rules. This isn’t totally trivial to do and would be pretty deep in our payments infrastructure.
3/ There’s some work happening to make “upcoming expected payments” visible on the API (and in the app). This would make it pretty easy to move money out just in time (using the pots API)
4/ But we’d want a nice way to hide the pots transaction (which is much in demand because of coin-jar anyway)

Scheduled deposit/withdrawals (like everyday, move £10 out of my lunch money pot) will probably be built as part of the existing scheduled payments service, it’s simpler and doesn’t require building a full rules engine.

I’m pretty hopeful that we’ll get to build a full pots rules implementation in the next few months, building one-offs like coin-jar isn’t really viable except for the very broadly applicable use cases, because of all the edge-cases and interactions it creates.

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