New Experiment: Transfer Money in MAKE by KBank by Apple Watch
MAKE by KBank is a money management application with basic mobile banking features, allowing you to organize, transfer and record your spending in one place. Our goal is to try pushing the boundary by experimenting with new ways of banking, made possible by technology, while still adhering to mobile banking security standards and core function. Before we dive into today’s main topic, let me first explain the key elements that set MAKE by KBank apart from its competitors.
Flutter
A lot of people might think that the banking industry is outdated. With security as their main concern, they opt to old technologies that have already been proven safe to implement. We want to challenge that belief and explore new technology that could serve customers better, which is why we need to move fast and fail fast. Flutter is the best choice since it allows us to develop fast while still maintaining the app performance.
Pop Pay: Wireless Transfer
One of the questions that I often received from pop pay user is “is it secure?”
Yes, Pop pay is secure. We only use Bluetooth to locate your friend. The way it works is once you open the Pop pay page in MAKE by KBank, your device will broadcast their beacon ID with dynamic proxyID to people within a 10-meter range. When it successfully finds your friends and retrieves their proxyID, the app will send that proxyID to the server for their bank account number. The app will then pass that account number automatically to you, and you just hit transfer. We’re still using a secure flow to transfer the money. In no way are we using Bluetooth to transfer at all, so rest assured.
Cloud Pocket
Many people that I know usually open multiple bank accounts to save money for different purposes. For example, if you want to save money for retirement, you might open a new bank account and make it a habit to transfer a sum there every month. The hard part is you have to keep track of how much money you have in each account, and how many accounts you have right now. We just make it simple by turning those bank accounts into digital ones that reside under one account number, placing them in the app, and renaming it, “Cloud Pocket”. It’s now easier to organize and keep track of your money. The second benefit is they are all digital pockets. You can open as many pockets as you’d like and close them whenever you want within a few clicks.
These are the experiments that we did with the app and receive good feedback from users. However, as you already know, we’re an innovation team, so we’re not going to stop with just three of these. We will continue to experiment more, continuously improving things that work and learn from things that don’t.
Now, let me show you our next experiment: transfer via a wearable device. This is not a feature that we promise to release to users. We’re still looking for the right way to implement it and test out the user experience. Our goal is simple: we want our users to transfer money more easily than using the mobile app. Therefore, we’ve come up with the wearable device idea, in which you don’t have to unlock your phone, find your friends, and then make a transfer.
The next part will be the technical aspect. Here’s the flow of our transfer.
Apple Watch will send a request to wake the application up. When the application starts working in the background, it will send the response back to the Apple Watch to notify that it’s ready and ask for the user pin. Here, we still follow the mobile banking standard. Every time you need to transfer, we will ask for your pin since we don’t save it on the device.
After the pin is sent from the watch, the app will send that pin to the server and send the needed information back to the watch, which is your friend list.
Once you select the friend, the watch will ask for the amount of money that you want to transfer. The transaction category will be assigned automatically. With such a small screen, asking for less information would be better for the user experience. If you would like to choose the category or add a memo, however, it’s better to use a mobile app instead of a watch. A wearable is more for a quick transfer.
The Apple Watch is basically an interface that sends a request to the secure app that we already developed. The watch just sends a command, like a remote, to the app to execute the transfer. The process is secure like you transfer using the mobile application.
We’re still in an early experiment stage, so I can’t say when this feature will be released. That said, our main goal is fairly simple: to make your money transferred as fast as possible. Apple Watch is one of the experiments that we’re hoping users won’t have to open the app to make a transfer.
Anyone looking for a challenge exploring new technology to create high-security mobile banking, listen up! Our team is growing and plan to expand at least 2–3X the size. We’re currently looking for Flutter Engineers and Golang Engineers. You don’t need to have any experience in those two frameworks, we just want your passion. Join us at KBTG by sending your resume to recruitment@kbtg.tech, samolkul.k@kbtg.tech, and don’t forget to note in the subject line that you’re applying for MAKE by KBank team 😺
Want to read more stories like this? Or catch up with the latest trends in the technology world? Be sure to check out our website for more at www.kbtg.tech
