Since you are re-thinking banking and aiming to provide all the information anyone could ever desire from a transaction on their mobile, why does it only show that i spent x amount in tesco but not what i bought and not any nutritional information about the products within the transaction and no other product suggestions which could have been healthier for me or maybe i would have been better off buying this shopping from morrisons?
I realise this is rhetorical in 2016, but when you are the uber of banking with influence over other entities in the payment transaction flow chart this will be a valid question.
Any thoughts on how you could grab this info from a future transaction? Can you envisage any way of breaking free from or influencing the information you receive from the network and the terminal? You are exploring APIs with financial providers but what about a Monzo Programming Interface where you can request extra info from terminals?
I think that’s incredibly invasive to be honest.
You already have the option to manually add notes and receipts.
Plus the chances of a retailer making an interface to transmit that information are slim to none.
There’s probably a clever way of using the API to link towards apps where you track your own purchases and/or nutritional stuff but for the retailer to transmit that to the app directly isn’t a good idea IMHO.
Tesco (or any of the other supermarkets) aren’t going to be willing to share this information - not because of our privacy, but because it’s commercially sensitive information. They can use it to work out where to place things in store to encourage you to buy other things. For example if 70% of people who buy coffee also buy Hobnobs, put the Hobnobs near the coffee on the shelves, then some of that 30% who aren’t buying may well do so…
Additionally, it’s none of my bank’s business if I buy milk or cheese or whatever.
Yeah I personally wouldn’t want the items that I buy coming up on my bank statements/apps etc. For starters it would be so cluttered but also personally I don’t see any value in having all that info.
Maybe not but there’s enough demand for this information to incentive third parties to develop / leverage the technology so that it can be captured i.e. through OCR for example. Once the technology’s there, I expect the supermarkets will share the information themselves to increase customer stickiness, just as they have for online shopping, by showing you your previous purchases.
I don’t think your bank is interested to be honest & if you’re worried about privacy, banks already look after some of the most sensitive personal data that you create. But Monzo wants to make this sort of data available for it’s users so that they can leverage it, transaction categories being the first step.
I would imagine the data would be there as an additional layer, beneath your transaction feed & what appears in your bank statements.
Tom’s talked about retrieving journey details from Uber’s API & enabling users to access their journey details from the app for example.
Once transactions can be split into multiple categories it would be logical to associate categories with different items for automatic transaction splitting…
@Monzo crack developers should take a look at the smart scan feature of expensify.com. It allows me to photograph receipts and add them to an expenses report, and it scans the details in automatically… Could be applied to receipt scanning attached to purchases?