I totally agree. Very weird email from a team who are clearly in denial. If you start paying, you wont get a penny back when they go bust. Shame - I actually really like the idea, but it needed more integrations with the likes of Monzo, and a revenue model which didnt involve the consumer. Glad I didn’t invest, but sorry to see them go. Never did get to the bottom of what happened with Monzo…
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I’m not against paying for the service, but the price needs to be lower. £10-15/year is the price that may tempt me for this kind of service.
However I’d also need to see some improvements to consider subscribing.
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I usually have 1 or 2 connections (out of around 10) which are broken and it takes them several weeks to fix. This needs to happen less.
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Currently it’s not much more than a convenient access point for billing documents, with some information on price trends on an account by account basis. But it could be more. I think it needs to do a better job at providing useful aggregate information and useful information on upcoming events. For example a screen/view where they list upcoming contract end dates in chronological order is something I’d particularly like to see.
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I’d actually like to see Monzo fill this space over time. Linked in with bill switching, I believe there is money to be made.
Monzo should buy them out and integrate it 
Although they could probably do a better job from scratch 
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This would be where having an iPad version of 
would come in useful 
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I’m not sure about that. This type of service probably needs a lot of tedious maintenance work to keep connections working smoothly. That’s probably not a good use of resources for Monzo.
As was alluded to earlier, what is perhaps first needed in this space is a Truelayer-type service that focuses on maintaining connections and nothing else. They then sell this service to others (such as Monzo) who can then focus on presentation and features.
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I think you’re all being a bit harsh. User behaviour is a strange one when dealing with apps and services like these. If a user wants something for FREE, then they should click Onedox’s links to give them commissions. If they don’t do that, then whats the point of Onedox offering the service. If you get a reminder for you car insurance or energy, and then go search CompareTheMarket for a new contract - that that is utterly a waste of time for Onedox. They are trying to monetise their business by giving you a service for FREE. I speak from experience, I run billsdashboard.com. Everyone has an opinion about what might work, what integrations they do etc, without having the balls to actually set up a website and do it.
And as for the comment about truelayer style connections, there are no APIs in utilities, and that will be coming soon imo. And if even someone did that, that is a MASSIVE job. There are a handful of banks. Compare that to the thousands of connections youd need to set up to give a proper service.
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Truelayer-type services were a thing long before APIs for banking. For example, Yodlee.
They simply did/do the screen-scraping on behalf of others.
To me, that is an argument for someone to focus on connections and nothing else.
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Fair enough. But when someone starts on a journey to simplify bills and the management of bills, they’re already invested in that. To do an about turn and work on connections to utilities is a BIG ask. But you may be on to something. Go for it yourself, why not?
And screen scraping is/will be banned under PSD2 - probably a good sign it wont work in utilities
The problem is as soon as API’s are available across the board, the opportunity is gone. Any man and his dog can work with APIs. Everyone will be doing it.
I’m not sure this is true.
It’s taking quite a bit of work for aggregators to get open banking connections working.
But then tbh, even once open banking has settled down, there could be a lot of value in a service with a single API/login point to all your utilities, particularly if you can give your bank permission to see all that and link up transactions, statements, switching etc in one place.
It would reduce friction in all sorts of ways, particularly if it could record your history across providers and accounts.
I can see some serious money to be made with a platform like that…
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Wasn’t that the point of Onedox?
No. Onedox does handle the connections itself but is not limited to that. It also provides a consumer-oriented app/service and features associated with that.
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Hmmm…pretty sure that’s their main “barrier to entry” though. I use quotes because I think that may be what’s proved a barrier to them rather than to protect them.
I tested Opnwrks’ API open banking connections. They connected to my bank account as a test. The output categorisation was completely wrong on 50% of the transactions. For example, they saw a Vodafone entry and thought it was a mobile phone payment. It wasn’t, it was a broadband payment. The reason BGL acquired Bean was because they didnt attempt to categorise the payments, they just used the name of the company. I believe they scraped but now have moved to open banking APIs. So even where there are companies that have made connections to banks, they arent getting it right. The problem lies in the acquiring banks set up, with companies not properly assigning the transaction settings (I believe). e.g. you buy petrol from Tesco, its registered as grocery shopping.
In my opinion, the way to make it work is to take payments classified as DD payments; and then asking the user to assign a category (energy, gas, council tax, car insurance, home insurance, mobile etc). User input is the only way to guarantee 100% accuracy. This is, in effect, what Money Dashboard does, but its far too painful at the moment as the user has to do ALL the work.
Onedox doesnt really handle ‘connections’ though does it. It takes a users’ password and logs in as them.
I would call that handling the connections. They’re not offloading that work to a business-to-business screen scraping provider.
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Onedox withdrawn from Starling’s marketplace:
We regret to inform you that from 1st December, Onedox will no longer be available through the Starling Marketplace. From this date, you won’t see Onedox in your Starling app and all data exchanged between your Onedox and Starling accounts will be deleted.
If you have provided payment details to Onedox in the hope of using their paid subscription service, we’re afraid Onedox will no longer be able to offer this alternative service. Naturally, you will not be charged.
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We’re really sorry to lose Onedox and we will continue to evaluate other providers who may be able to provide a similar service.
I hadn’t paid, and had allowed my Onedox account to be deleted but forgotten to check my Starling connection, so this is good news for me.
Shame, it was a useful service, but not worth £36/year and was sadly destined to crumble once it began charging.
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You were right! Just got email from Onedox with the subject
It’s not you, it’s us. Onedox is closing