Feeding my bank account

At the moment the pure benefit of this is that my N26 app helps me to categorise my expenses and that I’ve a nice overview of my total expenses. However, our financial data becomes more accessible thanks to PSD2 and new services are making more and more use of this data. At the moment these services are mostly focused on recurring expenses in order to optimise contracts and help the user to save money, but it’s just a matter of time until new service providers will also offer services on our full “financial footprint”.

In order for this to happen it’s important that the holder of the financial data (e.g. bank) understands the true value of the data and treats it accordingly. Until today the value of financial data has not been exploited much and keeping “the record” was a requirement but not a business purpose. A good example for this is the monthly bulk credit card payments. I’m using a credit card issued by a travel company which helps me saving credit card fees while booking a flight. However, since the monthly sum gets deducted in one sum, the data from each single booking is gone. My N26 app cannot categorise these single payments correctly and my “financial footprint” is inaccurate. This is because no party involved had an interest to move the data but just the payment itself. There was no value in forwarding the data. Personally, I believe removing barriers all around handling and transmission of financial data will be an important post-PSD2 step so service providers can actually make use of our financial footprint and not just payment transactions.

To be continued…