It’s an app that allows you to monitor your money from all of your bank accounts and credit cards and so far after playing with it I can certainly say it’s pretty good. It works with all the big players and works by using your internet banking details.
It’s similar to how Monzo shows you categories for your spending and if there’s something in there that you feel shouldn’t be, you can change them. The cool thing is that if you change the category you can then choose to do the same to similar transactions which it then brings back and you can choose to apply it to those you wish or to just that one. You get daily insights, top categories, top merchants and an overall summary of your incomings and outgoings on the dashboard/home screen. You can then delve deeper in the other tabs including monitor all your bills/subscriptions and set up budgets for individual categories, view transactions etc. Definitely looks like one of the better money managers out there.
I’ve been using this for a few weeks now and I really like it, more integrations with other providers would be good, plus a number of people on their Twitter have asked for Monzo integration which Yolt are keen for too when the time comes.
One thing I am not keen on is the ability to set a budget and track it, all the functionality is there but some of the UX journeys aren’t there yet.
We’ll it’s a better place to be in than last year. Yolt is a large bank and APIs ‘around the corner’ rather than some random company asking for bank details with no API in sight
So does Yolt currently use screen scraping? It sounds interesting, but I’m not happy handing my login details over to a third party (whether backed by a big bank or not), so if so I’ll wait for PSD2.
I assume they must do in the absence of any API I’m aware of and the passwords and security bits it asked for for each account were the ones I have to enter when logging in via the website.
I was worried at first about them asking for every login detail to get onto my account but then thought surely if it was a risk the banks would be able to challenge them and stop access despite the PSD2 changes to allow 3rd parties access. They have banking level security so chances of someone hacking them and taking my details is as much as someone hacking my bank and getting access and without my card and PIN to use in the reader no money can be transferred externally so the risk is very low.
I think it’s really good so far and I’m sure will replace my current spreadsheet monitoring that I do with a little bit more development.
When aggregators first appeared in the UK I signed up eagerly - I’d seen mint in the US and really wanted to have everything in one place.
I had a long conversation with FD about it and they absolutely stated that giving my login details to the aggregator was completely against their T&Cs and it would be at my own risk of loss. Not just if the aggregator was at fault, but any unauthorised use of my online account, simply because someone else had my login details. Too risky for me.
One thing I did learn is that FD can switch your online access to read only - I asked if I could have two logins so I could give the read only access to the aggregator but unfortunately this is not possible.
Maybe. Once PSD2 has been implemented by the legacy bank’s though, Monzo will be able to access user’s data using secure authentication, rather than the current approach though.
A control centre is a good way of giving people back that feeling of … being in control.
I can imagine a Monzo hub, with savings and investment accounts of elsewhere also linked into it so at least you can see how much is in there (as a starting point). To me that would be useful. Just being able to see your balances and be fully aware of them at all times is a great step in financial management.
I’ve revisited yolt now that they’ve added JL as a provider and I’m liking the summary of spending.
Note, I only add credit cards to it, nothing that can actually spend money should their security be breached. If they want to log in to my credit card accounts and pay them off then I’ll be perfectly happy
Shame their in app support is not really in app - it tries to open an email and I don’t have mail configured on my iphone.
I don’t have too many bank accounts/credit cards, but there’s this app called Yolt where stores all your accounts into one, so you don’t have to keep switching apps. Are any of you using it?
