Bankloch

With the rise of digital platforms and marketplaces and the gig-economy as a whole, applications send more and more notifications to their users. These notifications can be a very helpful tool for calling users to action and driving engagement on the platform but can also lead to notification fatigue (especially as all digital platforms send dozens of notifications).   A good notification strategy is therefore essential . At the same time, setting up the tooling to support this notification strategy is also of upmost importance. Such tooling should be able to implement the different features of a good notification manager at a low cost. Unfortunately most firms still build such a notification manager from scratch, resulting in a poor result (in terms of configurability, intelligence and usability) and hundreds of mandays spent on it. It is therefore better to work with a tool which manages all aspects of such a   notification manager . Unfortunately, in the world ...

Almost every recent article written about banking starts with the statement that the   banking industry is being disrupted   by new competitors, new innovations and new technologies. Although this statement is definitely true, the extend of the disruption can still be debated. Even the most innovative neo-banks still work with bank (current, saving, term and investment) accounts, cards (credit and debit), traditional credits, existing payment infrastructure…​ The user experience surrounding the origination and servicing of these products has dramatically improved (and will continue to evolve), but the underlying banking products are not really disrupted. You could argue that banking products are so intertwined with society and our way of thinking about finance, that they can’t be disrupted, but looking at those products you cannot ignore that they are far from an optimal solution in our current digital world. Let’s consider   cards   for example. Isn’t ...

Already more than 10 years ago, when Google Docs came out, IT experts predicted the time of fat-clients, needing to be installed on your local PC, would long be over. With the ever-increasing power of modern browsers, any application could be served as a web-app and your PC would transition to a light-weight terminal, on which only a browser would be installed and running. Unfortunately looking at my PC today, this trend is far from being completed as I still have dozens of applications deployed on my PC. As always reality did not quite catch up with the predictions, for multiple reasons: Browsers still have certain   functional limitations , making it difficult to build web-applications with same feature completeness as a desktop application Technical performance   of web-based applications is often worse than when installed locally. E.g. Google’s gaming platform (Stadia) only came out in 2019, as it took Google years to resolve the latency issue, which is c...

In August 2019, I wrote a blog post on PFM tools called "PFM, BFM, Financial Butler, Financial Cockpit…​ - Will the cumbersome administrative tasks on your financials finally be taken over?". Since then, driven by the go-live of PSD2 and Open Banking APIs, numerous Fintechs are developing new solutions acting as your personal financial butler. As most of the Fintechs focus on managing your financial budget, the name " Budgeting-app " is used more and more. Dozens of examples of such apps already exist in the market (such as Dyme, Mint, YNAB, Monny, PocketGuard, Cake, Yolt, Emma, Oval Money, Cleo, Buddy, Spendo, Roov, Pocket Buget, Money Pro, SayMoney…​) making the market a red ocean, where competition is fierce. At the same time banks are also providing more and more account   aggregation and budgeting features   in their banking-app, making it hard to convince customers to manage their finances in a third-party app. Especially now that specialized firms, ...