Developing perfect PFM Apps

We are living in the age when everything tends to be in the cloud, mobile friendly and easily accessible. The way many people make money has changed drastically over the last few decades, more and more people are doing the jobs that simply didn’t exist some years ago. While the ways to generate revenues have been changing drastically, the methodologies used to help people manage their funds better have not developed that well. Some Personal Finance Management applications have appeared, yet it is quite hard to tell that any of them became popular. Well, probably except of Mint.com, this app is growing.

While there are tons of other similar apps, it is quite hard to find a truly useful one. So what makes a PFM application handy? I believe that its ease of access and seamless synchornisation. Currently we are moving to a cashless society, a place where card payments are accepted nearly everywhere and in many countries there is no even a need of contact. This leads us to a conclusion that a bank could, most probably, supply a person with a great tool of aggregating the inflows and outflows, analysing this data and advising on it. Yet it may not always be true, as a person can often use cards from more than a single bank.

This is where a thrid-party PFM app comes handy, as it can be a central location where user's transcations are summarized. However, the main barrier between regular PFM apps and useful PFM apps lays in the amount of the effort a user has to take. A regular PFM app would require you to make imports of your bank account statements into the app or enter the transactions manually. This is not a good way to design your app, as for many users it can be a show stopper.

This is where banking API comes handy. Although there are almost no banks that supply API to its services, there are 3rd party providers like Kontomatik, Yodlee, Plaid and more that let PFM apps to become way more useful. An application powered by banking API can synchronise with user's bank accounts and suppy the data almost in real time. This way a using such a Personal Finance Management tool can be really easy and not time consuming at all. 

The market for PFM apps is not saturated at all, yet it does take an enormous amount of effort to develop and promote such an application. Banking API allows the whole process of using PFM apps to be much smoother and this is definitely the future in managing personal finances.