Emma Feedback Thread / Q&A

I’ve started using Emma again. I don’t like the slightly comic UI but the ability to show credits and ignore transactions makes it far easier to get a true view of my monthly spend in certain categories (compared to the current Monzo budgeting iteration).

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My 2 only issues with Emma are…

  1. Needs to go payday to payday (which I read above is coming)
  2. It needs to support more banks… at the moment I cant connect my Tesco Credit Card or Virgin Credit Card…
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Hey all, I’ve just merged two threads with Emma feedback. Let use this as the main thread from now on :+1:

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Hi guys, thanks for the feedback. Just wanted to give you a quick update on what it’s coming.

  1. Payday: this is the most requested feature so far. We should be able to ship it by the end of the month.
  2. Subscriptions improvement: we are going to start tracking everything. At first, we excluded rents/loans/mortgages, but from the end of this week, we’ll ship an update to improve the tracking.
  3. Weekly Reports: we are currently working on this. They look really cool and will be swapped with the Monday reminder.
  4. We are going to restructure the feed.
  5. Merchants will come in Analytics.
  6. Search for tags, notes, transactions, merchants.

I have seen some people mentioned the FCA. This is a really nice summary of what happened on the 13th of January and how the industry got regulated: https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/account-information-and-payment-initiation-services

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@edo1493 any news on additional account providers? Or at least put curve in so I can see my non-amex cards via them?

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We should be able to get Metro, Bank of Scotland and TSB/FD credit cards from our provider - this is currently under discussion. On the other side, I think we’ll be able to get Paypal done over the summer.

We are evaluating when and how we can get the others. It might be the case we wire up to a second provider and have them right away.

ps: regarding Curve, they don’t have an API and an integration might just break things for already connected cards. All the transactions would be doubled. I have seen they have have a “Vote for future connections” section and Emma is missing. :stuck_out_tongue: They still have OnTrees that was shut down 2 months ago.

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I’ll ask curve to put emma on the list!

For me, I’d like to see JL Finance and Tandem as CC providers…

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Thanks! Tandem is releasing an API end of the year, I think. They don’t have anything yet.

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That reminds me, have you fixed the doubled up transactions on Amex supplementary cards?

Any update on Clydesdale and capital one

A few of interest to me:

  • Yorkshire Building Society
  • Coventry Building Society
  • Moneyfarm
  • Nutmeg
  • Ratesetter
  • Zopa

It’d also be good to be able to manually enter account balances and assets (like house prices) where integration isn’t possible yet so you can see a net worth figure.

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@edo1493 - Skipton savings is not on any finance app that I can find :cry: Would you look at supporting them!? Pleasseeee

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Clydesdale should come with Metro and BoS.

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Regarding financial tools, we, of course, want to integrate them too. The nice thing is that once we are able to initiate payments, Emma can potentially help you invest in Zopa / Ratesetter loans.

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The economics of integrating minority providers are interesting. I used to have a current account with N&P before they discontinued it. By some rough calcs I’d concluded that they must have had quite a bit less that 100k customers for the current account when the closure was announced. I imagine that many building societies (probably excluding YBS and maybe Coventry) would had customer numbers in the tens of thousands tops.

Given that these institutions probably aren’t very tech savvy and aren’t compelled to implement open banking, I wonder if the cost of integration with, for example, Emma is prohibitive. @edo1493, any thoughts?

It’s all a bit of a shame with this long-tail of largely mutual providers, really. I worry that it will become a vicious circle where they’re too small / inexperienced to provide open APIs which then which will then prevent them from becoming specialised providers, and in turn lead to mergers or closures…

(I wondered in another thread if there’s an opportunity for Monzo - or one of its competitors - to help here, but that’s probably off-topic for this thread!)

Hi Peter, anyone who provides a payment account is required by law to have a way to access it (API), so a future where we have a single entity that can connect to everything is not that far. It will take sometime and we are prioritising by number of customers, so the big ones are coming first. :slight_smile:

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I am surprised that the law didn’t mandate a single, universal API schema that all banks should conform to. Would’ve been so much nicer, just put in the API root URL from any bank and enjoy…

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That would have meant actually speaking to each other and the people making the rules to understand what the tech side means… Unfortunately, the people making the plans / rules have no clue how things work :man_shrugging:

We end up with a half-baked solution…

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You mean like this?

https://www.openbanking.org.uk/open-data-apis/

I’ve not looked at it in detail, so maybe the API is rubbish, but I think the point of developing this is for the exact reasons you’ve set out.

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Hey @edo1493, when can we expect support for MBNA?