Virtual 'Savings' Accounts

(marvin_luksenberg) #1

Hey guys,

Probably the one thing I’d most like from my bank -but which Mondo could potentially provide- is the ability to put money aside in labeled buckets… virtual savings account of sorts.

The Issue (Example)
It’s the beginning of the month, my salary’s just come in but I also get tons of bills and I know that I should put aside £50 to pay my electricity bill at the end of the month, £20 to pay that water bill… and I also ought to put £50 aside if I want to take that holiday in a couple of months.

So I’ll transfer all of that money (£120 in this example) to my Savings account. Come the end of the month though, I’ll look at my savings account and I’ll have no idea what the money was for - ‘How much were each of those bills again?’. Unfortunately I’ll likely forget about my holiday fund entirely and just spend that money on other, less important things. And this confusing situation is made worse if I already had money on my savings account before.

The Solution:
Being able to create folders or virtual accounts of sorts, and transferring money from your card balance there. You could easily name these virtual accounts to make their purpose clear. Any amounts transferred to those accounts are deducted from your card balance so they cannot be spent.
The functionality I had in mind:

  • One tap to release all of the money within a virtual account, back into your ‘main’ account. And the ability to just transfer back a specified amount
  • Being able to transfer money between virtual accounts
  • When a virtual account balance hits 0: being asked if you’d like to delete or keep it (you may want to keep it to more quickly transfer funds back into it in the future)
  • To make them easier to identify, virtual accounts get an icon which is automatically set based on keywords (similar to how the Google Calendar app automatically finds a background image based on the name of the event)

Nice-to-have:

  • The ability to create rules for transfers in between accounts (e.g. on the 2nd day of the month, transfer £xx to this account; send me a message when the balance for this account reaches £xx, etc.)

As it currently is, Mondo’s great to understand where your money’s going but a lot could be done to allow people to plan ahead and to better manage their finances. But obviously, I appreciate this is very much an Alpha version.

Thanks for your time and keep up the great work!
Best,
Marvin

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(Hugo Cornejo) #2

Wow, thanks a lot for this feedback. We’re totally building something like that at some point. Something that seduces me particularly is the idea of shared “virtual accounts”, so you can have a card with your flatmates for household expenses, another one with your partner for holidays, etc. etc.

It’s going to be awesome :sunglasses:

Competitor update
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(culshaw) #3

I’ve had a very similar thought about buckets and am going to be creating something that does this probably with the API here (hi, i’d love to have access) or the Teller API when that matures a little more

(Tristan Thomas) #4

Hey @culshaw, you can now get API access to your own account from developers.getmondo.co.uk :wink:

(culshaw) #5

thank you Tristan, you’re my favourite Mondonaut!

(Asher) #6

That would indeed be awesome.

I recently tried to open a joint account at mine and my partners bank, it was painful - even with both of us there we still haven’t managed it.

(marvin_luksenberg) #7

Hey Hugo. Anytime. I hadn’t thought about shared virtual accounts, but I can definitely see the potential!! Fingers crossed this materialises sooner rather than later :slightly_smiling:

(james_e_bell) #8

Would love to have this - there isnt anything on the market that solves this problem I think - I have been specifically looking for somethign that supports virtual savings accounts (and shared ones in particular) but nothign that I am aware of. I would definitely switch my bank to one that offered this as it would solve a big financial problem (ability to split up my savings and allocate them to particular things)

(Duncan) #9

+1 yes please! This is the key feature I’ve been endlessly searching for and no bank offers. It’s as important to be able to easily budget future money as much as it is useful to extract trends from past money. You could do all sorts of things, like alert people when their spending will take them over a particular sub-budget that month, show people progress towards particular savings goals “three more months till you can buy XXX!” Would absolutely love this feature.

(adam) #10

Cool. I had a very similar idea back in 2013 for dynamic slush funds with the only difference being that funds in a specific bucket would only be accessible by organization that I had granted access and not by any others - an OAuth type of mechanism. This would silo my money and protected my account from excessive or duplicate charges and also stop me from spending money I shouldn’t!

I’m super-excited that may soon be a reality thanks to Mondo!

(t.ip308) #11

This would be great to have!

The ability to create rules would make this especially compelling, not just in a direct debit way - to transfer money on particular month - but if we were able to detect changing spending habits to aid saving and budgetting.

For example, if I set a daily budget of £10 for lunch, and each day that I spend less than that (detected through rules such as time, outlet and possibly location) it automatically puts the difference into my ‘Savings’ folder.

A more advanced development could me through the use of learning algorithms to detect changing spending habits automatically, so it know’s if I’m having a particularly frugal. month - simpler would even just the change in my mobile contract month on month.

(philip.fumey) #12

HSBC used to have this - but sadly discontinued the feature - but it meant that you could set yourself a goal (i.e. buy that drone - with your partner’s consent of course :innocent:) and push funds into that bucket over time. The view in the App / Website would then show you how with a progress bar how you were progressing against the savings goal.

(Phil) #13

Having separate or virtual savings accounts is essential. Great for diving your money for different purposes.

(culshaw) #14

So I’ve made a bit of progress with this and have built something in React. When I get a bit more time I’ll show it off but it’s super-super-Alpha and doesn’t actually make any transactions but sits on top of your Mondo and allows you to allocate transactions and credits (or a percentage of a credit) to a virtual ‘bucket’.

Obviously when you look at your Mondo card it would show the full balance but I’m toying with the idea of sending feed items when you allocate credit to a bucket.

However, I’m unsure whether it would be too confusing when looking at your phone.

(Danny Smith) #15

This is an awesome idea :+1:. I’d use both shared ‘virtual’ accounts and joint ‘virtual’ accounts all the time.

#16

Being able to generate a virtual PAN (card number) with some specific criteria from within your Mondo account would be awesome. A few potential uses:

  1. Card number with a monthly limit of £15 for a child to use online, like an ‘online allowance’. Would stop all these stories I keep seeing where someone’s 8 year old has spent 3 months salary on Fifa Ultimate Team packs.

  2. Card number with a lifetime limit of £79 to prevent your Amazon Prime subscription from auto-renewing next year.

  3. Specific card numbers that cover each regular bill payment, limited to the bill amount (plus a buffer maybe) each month, so if TalkTalk gets compromised again, the hackers can’t do anything with the card number they get hold of.

Would be a great feature, and also would mean that if you lost your physical card, any regular card payments linked to your account would be unaffected.

(Gareth) #17

This is my number 1 feature. I’d love to be able to have ‘savings’ buckets where you can add multiple items:

I need to save £x for xxxxxxxxxx by xx/xx/xxxx

and then Mondo works out how much needs to go into each item to reach it by the date, automatically prioritising and suggesting realistic time frames/adjusting virtual amounts.

If I can finally get rid of my ‘out of date a month later’ Google sheet budgets and have real cash, I’d be delighted.

#18

I love this idea but without having separate card numbers maybe its just possible for a Mondo user to restrict and limit certain merchants access to your account.
When you set up a direct debit with a company you’re essentially allowing them to help themselves to whatever they reckon you owe them, that’s an enormous amount of trust and it still surprises me that people are so happy to do it (I try to use standing orders where I can). Maybe Mondo could just stick limits on direct debit merchants to £x per month.

Also I don’t think its useful to conflate savings and regular bill payments like the OP suggests. Would make sense to have separate features for each thing. Your bank could be trained to ‘expect’ a DD, SO or reccuring card payment and therefore deduct this expected payment from your disposable balance on every new payday cycle, it will recognise the merchant when the bill is collected without having to disturb your balance (of course you can avoid any of this by setting all your bills to be paid the same day you’re paid, but thats not always possible).

(James Billingham) #19

With regards to virtual cards, this was just announced: https://privacy.com

It’s not a new idea. In fact, it has been implemented by hundreds of banks in hundreds of slightly different ways over the years.

It never seems to stay though. While there have been hundreds of implementations, very few of them are still available.

(james_e_bell) #20

Interesting, thanks for sharing! (the site is quite nice as well as!). I agree - I have seen lots of those virtual credit card implementations before - I wonder if there is really such a problem/user need there. There is definitely pain points e.g. concern about theft of card number or forgetting to cancel a free trial etc but are they really painful enough for the mass market that they are willing to set up a whole new service to protect them - I suspect anything that adds friction to payment is not going to get adoption.

however - the virtual savings account ideas mentioned above I haven’t seen implemented anywhere before - Natwest has savings goals that you can set and save towards but they are 1-1 linked to actual savings accounts and cant be generated virtually.