In the accounts section of the app Emma groups accounts by type of account (i.e. all current accounts grouped together, all savings accounts grouped together, etc) leading to mixing of accounts from different banks in the accounts lists.
I have come to the conclusion that I don’t actually find this mode of organisation helpful. This is because whenever I want to review my accounts I’m actually finding it preferable to launch the apps of my individual banks one by one than to use the accounts tab in Emma. I think this is because of the way the accounts are grouped/listed in Emma. This means, for me at least, Emma is not entirely fulfilling the role I would like it to fulfill (which is to remove the need for me to have individual banking apps on my phone).
Most account aggregators I have tried take the same approach as Emma (group by account type). However, I have recently taken a look at Bankin and it provides different view options. Their ‘All’ view groups by bank (what I would like to see) and their other views group by account type (like Emma).
I would like to suggest you include a view, like Bankin’s All Accounts view, which groups accounts by bank.
UPDATE: Have edited the title of the thread since there is now also some discussion in the thread of sort order in the accounts section.
I imagine an “all accounts view” would be difficult, but please can we change the sort order in the current accounts views.
Sometimes it’s handy to see which accounts have most money in, but most of the time it’s confusing that the order changes so much. I’d suggest an option to sort alphabetically, then if people want to group by bank they can change the account name to include the bank at the start.
I don’t understand why it would be particularly difficult. It seems to me it would just be an alternative way of presenting existing underlying information. But I’m not a programmer.
I also generally don’t like the by-value sort order within the account type groupings and was going to create a separate thread for that. I would appreciate an option/toggle to change to alphabetical.
However, even if this were implemented I think I would still find it easier to go to individual bank apps one-by-one when I wanted to see an overview of what I have at each bank. So I would still like to see a separate view in Emma which groups accounts by bank.
The way we see it most of the times is that we need to take some high level decisions and implement them. We can’t have five toggles for each view.
In this case, we would need to kill the graphs and put everything in a single vertical list; so it’s a tough call, considering we don’t see Emma as the app where you want to see all your accounts in one place and we don’t want it to be.
My suggestion wouldn’t be to have that as the only view. It would be to have an ‘All accounts’ view in which accounts are grouped by bank in addition to your existing grouped-by-account-type views (Everyday, Savings, Investments). Basically similar to the the way Bankin does it.
That’s interesting. I think of that as the primary reason for using an account aggregator. Would be interesting to know what how you view the main purpose of Emma if it’s not as a means to seeing all accounts in one place. Perhaps this thread is not the place for that but I think it would make an interesting blog post. Or perhaps you have already written a blog post on it?
We do get 15-20% that use it to have “all your accounts in one place”. In terms of us, aggregation is nice, but it’s just one of the many features we offer and don’t want it to be the main reason to download Emma (any other company can aggregate).
Reading the forum generally, it’s becoming clearer that there’s a tension between what certain people want from Emma (potentially just small groups) and really what is going to be of interest to the majority of users…
I think the forum, at least for now, will be the 10% with 20 bank connections each.
This is super okay and the majority of features we have developed so far has come from this niche. We have got to a point tough where we also need to think about the 90% too.
I am firmly in the 10% who use Emma account aggregation - with 2 and a half exceptions (Tandem, Hargreaves Lansdown and Tesco) it works well with all the accounts I have. I’ve been looking for something like this for years, and haven’t previously found anything that just works. It there was a browser based view (or Windows app!) so I could get it on my desktop as well that would be even better.
In common with a lot of fintech, I don’t think the promises of saving money/amazing unique features really live up to much. If I hadn’t seen this thread I would never have realised that Emma wasn’t an account aggregator, and I think I was happier not knowing. Anyone can make promises that they’ll save you money, only a few can produce a useful tool.
When you say that 40% of your active users only have one bank linked, are you really sure they’re actually unique, active users? Sounds like people who’ve had a look and not bothered going further, or people who are gaming the referral program.
With one bank linked I really struggle to see what the advantage is over the bank app, unless the bank has a really rubbish app or you really like the cool fintech vibe.
I would definitely support the idea of accounts sorted alphabetically.
The average number of accounts (per user) is about 2-3 and I think this stat is way above the one I gave before (connections); but we are more than happy to consider anything.
My personal view, above anything else, is that even with a single bank supported the app must have product market fit. We could only support LLoyds and that would give us access to 23 million users, which is already quite a big number.
Emma is a tool that needs to help people make smart decisions about their lives. In the past months, we have seen people who were in debt, needed to save, wanted to start investing and they all started using Emma because in a way or in another we were addressing their needs.
Aggregation is just a feature we are using to build something much bigger on top and is a “given feature” which you are going to see in every single finance app in the next few months/years.
I can see that with proper open banking aggregation is going to be easy/widespread and so difficult to monetise. What I can’t see is where the useful features of Emma, or other similar apps come in. I suspect it might be in part because I already keep on top of my finances, know how much money I have and where it is etc. An aggregate makes that easier for me. But beyond that I haven’t seen anything that seems useful to me (I am aware I’m just one person!) What am I missing? What are the big things you can do for me?
I worry that there is a trap for fintechs that favours chasing more and more features over continuing focus on an area of strength. To me Curve is a good (or rather bad) example. “All your cards in one”, except they aren’t. Focus on subscriptions for rubbish insurance products. Free spending overseas, except for the hidden charges.
I thought it would be interesting to write about how we think internally and aggregation for us is not even on the table when we think about the future of Emma. This might not make sense to many here, but we have all the numbers to back this. eheh
In my case, I have never seen/found useful Curve. I am on Barclays and Amex - Apple Pay easily solves all my needs.
Aggregation on its own doesn’t have product market fit.