Probably the most important feature in a banking app
Banks are in the full process of digital transformation. Digital banks and fintech startups are popping up in every country. Users are happy because they have many choices to choose from.
But what do users want?
I can personally say that I use my banking app either for making a payment or checking my balance as well as the transactions. We can see from the image below that many others do the same.
If we think about making payments it’s either paying the bill, transferring money to a friend or paying with the card, or phone. Everything is as simple as it can be. We pay with the phones by connecting the card one time to either Apple Pay or Google Pay and then just start using it. We transfer money just by entering the amount, selecting the receiver and pressing send.
And all of this goes into one thing. The transaction feed. This is the place where we go seconds after getting our salary and this is the place where go seconds after making a credit card transaction. Just to check that everything is fine. We look at the sum and the receiver. No more money than what was necessary left the account. All good. Awesome.
Sometimes we press the merchant category to see how much we spent on groceries or entertainment. Sometimes we want to check how much we spent on a single merchant. We can’t. Why can’t banks give us this feature?
Well, they can, but it won’t work as you want.
The merchant names that a bank gets from VISA or Mastercard are dirty, or not exactly like the name of the brand we know about (e.g.: American Fast Food Restaurants Holdings Inc, which may be actually McDonald’s). The user won’t care about the legal name of the company or the name of some merchant POS location. The user wants to know the brand, the clean merchant name. The one he recognizes, just by looking at the logo.
So even if you bought something at each McDonald’s in the country, the bank cannot list you all the McDonald’s transactions, because each location has a different POS location name. You can still check each individual transaction though, but it’s just not the same.
Here comes Zizy!
Zizy put together a database from multiple data sources and offers through an API, access to clean merchant names, their high-quality mobile-optimized logos, and their respective merchant categories, as well as maintaining the data up-to-date.
Zizy built the product in the way that it checks multiple data sources, it gathers all the data into one database, it cleans it with the help of AI and as a final touch, there is a manual review for each clean name and logo. The logos have a standard size and are adjusted where needed, in order to be of high-quality and mobile-ready. It looks gorgeous. It’s the best possible quality.
Banks can update their feed with a new, simple, clean and visual look. They can update both old transactions and new transactions, as well as offering new features that would increase the user experience and the desire to use the app more.
Isn’t this awesome? Yes, it is indeed great. And digital banks are the ones that will do this in the near future. While they do not have so many banking operations in place yet, they really do a great job at being a tech company and designing a great UX.
Where are traditional banks though?
They are working on the digital transformation. They are redesigning their internal tools while trying to build a simpler and efficient app. Although, they should not forget one thing. They make money from the customer and they need to be customer-centric. (see Amazon or Apple)
The user doesn’t know and won’t care what you do internally. The user only cares about the experience, the capabilities and the ease of use.
So, the big question: Is the transaction feed the most important feature?
Some would say yes, some would say no. However, it allows us to see how much money we have and where we spend them, and this is what we check the most. This is why we built Zizy. To enhance the transaction feed and help to provide the best user experience both for us and for everyone.
