How Does Financial API Help Personal Financial Management Apps?
Living in the fast-moving information world, training people to be educated about financial literacy and have the interest to put more attention on financial management is crucial. With a financial management platform, people are able to monitor their financial health and feel settled about their financial goals. Financial management is not the new thing, people have done similar things manually for decades.
Recently, people have started to own multiple accounts in various financial institutions. Moreover, the financial institutions are diverse, such as banks, e-wallet, investment platforms, and many more. Talking deeper about this behavior, people have a tendency to try every product from various financial institutions, comparing the services, and utilizing the promotion. In other points of view, people have to manage their financial matters at least into both checking and saving accounts. So, avoiding using multiple accounts from different financial institutions would be impossible and the need for a financial management platform is rising at the same time as well.
Personal Financial Management (PFM) app is a platform that helps the user to maintain their income and expenditure in healthy condition. PFM acts as a financial planning tool because of its ability to make a financial mapping from different accounts and financial institutions. By using PFM, users do not need to check their balance one by one for every account. User’s accounts will be integrated automatically, it’s very helpful to help people allocate their post of money. Thus, the user will be able to make financial decisions easily.
In another perspective, people use many bank accounts to ease their client/business partner to choose which channel they are more comfortable with. Tracking business transactions or making cash flow reports would be so much easier in just one app. The other reason for using many financial accounts can be related to the uncertain condition of every financial institution, sometimes the service can not be accessed anytime without an announcement before. Using others as alternatives is one of strategic action. So, the business owner can give their client the best service, then the client possibly gives them loyalty.
Regarding the need for personal financial management, many companies compete to provide the best service as fast as possible or their market can be seized by their competitor anytime. Serving the multiple integrations among many financial institutions should be accompanied by establishing a reliable technology such as API. Transferring data between different institutions possibly having trouble with issues like security, compatibility, and integration error, so that a reliable API is a fundamental need for PFM service. No matter how powerful the feature or aesthetic of the interface, without a tenacious API it means nothing.
One of the easiest ways to connect the user with many financial accounts is by using an open API. However, API for personal financial management should be maintained well. The service provider has to check their API regularly regarding the full traffic across financial institutions which happens every time in their system. It means, when one connection is in trouble, many transactions can be affected. With reliable API the PFM apps can minimise the maintenance and downtime so that the user will be satisfied with the service and improve the customer experience & loyalty as well.
