Product Story: Shared Pocket, a collaborative approach to managing money
Humans are social beings, we need other people to thrive. Especially for Indonesians, we have a gotong royong culture that is so ingrained in our ethical values and everyday life. Almost everything in life will involve money. And for certain things, others might have a stake in the way we manage the financial activity.
Couples planning on their first house, new parents that want to pool education funds for their newly born, these are some of the examples of day-to-day scenarios that show two or more people working together on a common goal that involves money management. They need a space to store the cash for these goals, ideally, one they can manage and monitor easily.
For years, opening a shared bank account, commonly known as a joint account, has become the go-to solution. Although the account opening process is quite a hassle, the couples co-owned the account and can do the saving together.
However, the need for financial collaboration spans beyond couples. In Indonesia, we could have extended families living together or first jobbers living in a communal house. For these cases, they need a way to manage their household expenses together. But because it involves more than two people, opening a joint account might not be the best solution for them.
For communities and people who want to do a trip together with their best friends, they need to manage the fund for group activities together. In these use cases, opening a joint account might not even be a viable solution at all. Once the backpacking trip is done, the account would be obsolete. Also what if one day someone is leaving the group? Removing them from the joint account requires a complicated administrative process and consumes a lot of time.
This is where Jago Shared Pocket comes in handy.
What is a Shared Pocket?
Shared Pocket is actually any of your Pockets in Jago that can be shared with your fellow Jago users. Because it is technically a Pocket, you can create more than one of these money containers and share it with different sets of people for any purpose that you can think of. And staying true to Jago’s spirit to simplify banking, you can be sure that Shared Pocket doesn’t have any of the administrative complications of the conventional bank account.
Shared Pocket is often used for managing family bills, saving for education, pooling money for a friend’s birthday, or as a way for parents to control their kids’ allowance. And because Shared Pocket is very flexible, it can support any kind of financial collaboration that you can think of.
So, how did we develop and build Shared Pocket?
Exploring the many types of social circle
We have done multiple fieldworks, focus groups, and interview sessions during our exploratory research to uncover underlying needs and opportunity areas in the context of money management and lifestyle. During our research, we have talked to different kinds of people with backgrounds ranging from tech entrepreneurs to regular housewives in urban and suburban areas.
Generally, people that work or play together, or live in the same place for a certain length of time show the need for financial collaboration in different shapes and forms. But in the case of married couples, and more specifically the wives, we found a strong urgency for financial transparency, inclusivity in the decision-making process, and a sense of control for family financial situations.
From those insights, we feel that it will not be adequate to just go with the plain vanilla feature of joint accounts. It lacks several key points that can address our target customers’ needs.
Currently available joint account schemes possessed several disadvantages:
- Inflexible: Joint accounts can only be shared with family members registered in the same family register (Kartu Keluarga). Furthermore, only two people can be the designated holders of a joint account.
- Impractical: Account holders have to provide a heap of supporting documents to prove the relationship between participating parties. They have to be physically present at the bank for document verification and agreement signing, which means more effort on their part.
- Risk of dispute: In a joint account scheme where either spouse can make purchases on behalf of the other, there is a higher risk of dispute.
- Inconvenient tracking: No real-time update on account activities.
So for Shared Pocket, the initial set-up should be simple and flexible enough to fit different kinds of use cases, and the mechanism should be built with security and control as a top priority.
Roles and Responsibilities
The general concept for Pockets is digital money storage for your everyday needs. So the flexibility and simplicity are there, what is lacking is the collaboration component with access control. We take cues from popular data storage products such as Google Drive and Dropbox that have an easy-to-use sharing functionality, with access level solutions for managing risk.
Shared Pocket is like Google Drive, but for money. You can control who gets access to the money and the privileges they have on it.
Members of a Shared Pocket will be assigned one of three available roles: Owner, Can Spend, and Can View. Owners can invite and remove members, assign roles, manage transaction limits, and set up a target. Those who are categorized under Can Spend are allowed to do transactions inside the Pocket. As for the Can View members, their roles are limited to contributing and observing.
This scheme simplifies managing a shared account for different use cases. Owners can easily remove members who no longer want to contribute without having to go through administrative hassles, or close the Pocket when it is no longer necessary. Furthermore, defining a robust access control for each role also minimizes dispute risk, as members understand who is in charge of what.
Now, in a Shared Pocket, a user’s journey begins with sending or receiving the invitation to collaborate. This initial exchange is a critical point where both parties need to understand the consequences of their decision and also how they feel with the other party emotionally.
We assess their awareness of Roles and Responsibilities, as well as trust level in giving others access to their accounts. Collaborating in a Shared Pocket required strong trust between all the participants. They also have to fully understand money ownership, what they and the other party can and cannot do in the Pocket.
We manage that by having clear steps on the app that highlight every important decision that users need to pay attention to so that they can make a conscious decision on each of the settings.
What’s next?
Through Shared Pocket, Jago App pioneered an easy and flexible feature for financial collaboration. We manage to implement additional values for users, such as:
- Effortless sharing capability: Sharing a Pocket in Jago App is just a few clicks away, either through their pocket number, phone number or their name tag and they will receive a notification in their app to accept the invite.
- Secured money movement: Users are always in control of the Pocket they share with their family and friends. With specific access levels via assigning roles and the ability to manage it anytime from the app.
- Transparency: All transactions made within that shared pocket will be recorded in the Pocket’s transaction history with a clear indication of who expend how much to where at what time. Even each person’s contribution is easily monitored via the add-ons. And on top of that, all participants will receive a real-time notification for any activity related to the Shared Pocket.
- The more the merrier: A Shared Pocket owner can invite up to 29 other Jago users at any time they want. Bring your whole gang to the action!
Even though we initially created this product focusing on families, its usage has evolved beyond it. We are just scratching the surface of many possible use cases for collaborative actions enabled by Shared Pocket.
Through further research and experimentation, we’re looking into more opportunities to build useful collaborative features that will change how users perceive financial planning and money management.
Are you passionate about simplifying financial services and building relatable solutions? Join our team.
