Decluttering my mind into the web ...
date posted: 2020-Jul-12, last edit date: 2020-Jul-12
Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion / experience and not the opinion of any company I have worked for.
Back in 2018, I worked on enhancing spends transactions at my bank. I tried to make them properly categorized into different spending groups (e.g., food, travel, etc.) as well as unifying the merchant names (e.g., "starbucks avenues phase 1" and "starbucks grand" should just become "starbucks"). My aim was to create a proper Personal Finance Managent (PFM). Something similar to Mint.
This was fairly neglected at the time (not just my bank but all banks in Kuwait). And quite honestly, I thought it was just ridiculous that in 2018 if a customer wants to know what is he most spending on, then he has to do it manually by himself.
So I took the initiative and once it showed a bit of potential they decided to go to market, quickly, in order to become the first bank in the country to offer this service. The first bank that enables some form of data analytics to the end user (as opposed to just used in-house). The result was the spending insights.
However, there are several issues with it in my opinion, the two major ones are:
There are many reasons for this that I wont get into here. But suffice it to say that I don't even use it anymore, because in its current form it is not really useful.
The interesting thing however is that I started to see other banks in Kuwait attempt their own version of a PFM. The most serious of which is from Warba Bank. This is good and hopefully more banks start to have this as an essential feature that they offer to their customers.
Open banking is the idea that banks should provide APIs to third-party developers (think of "Baas", or Banking as a Service). While this might be considered unthinkable in Kuwait, it is already happening in the UK and other parts of the world. Now imagine what this offers to the end user:
This in essense provides end users with a truly "global" view of their finances. Enabling them to properly manage their money and help them achieve financial independence.
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