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Yesterday I talked about the difficulty of managing multiple financial accounts, and that we needed one account to rule them all.
The problem with this is that you then have concentration risk, as one account if hacked would mean you would lose it all in seconds. So, what to do?
The answer is one aggregated account to rule them all. This was the dream of market leader Yodlee years ago, but account aggregation has been a controversial discussion. Cut and pasting account details, entering usernames and passwords and providing other secret information to an account aggregator has always caused debate. Nevertheless, it could be coming into prime time, as users have so many account openings.
As Truelayer puts it:
Account aggregation takes the mess out of managing money. Made much more powerful with open banking, it compiles data from multiple bank accounts into a single, streamlined view. No more logging into multiple apps. No more struggling to get a complete picture of your finances.
Lovely jubbly.
But let’s put account aggregation on steroids by adding generative financial AI to it.
In this case, you could have account aggregation that is informed, intelligent, immersive and predictive.
In this case, we could have a financial system with one account to rule them all – the aggregated account – which we could talk to. “Pay my son’s school fees”; “today is rent day, deal with it”; “I need a flight to Heathrow”; and so on. You get the idea.
But that idea is pretty basic as why should the customer have to take these actions? You get emails and other alerts when payments are due, so why not integrate these services with the intelligent aggregator and have everything done for you.
You then just get soft alerts as events happen, bills are paid, and balances updated, and need do nothing.
Let’s just take that one step further and think about technologies like Apple’s Vision Pro and biometric payments. In this case, the intelligent aggregator takes your integrated accounts and emails and billing, and manages all of it for you. But now, the intelligent aggregator can present visualisation details of what is happening across all of your accounts and, when a big bill is being processed like school fees, ask you if you are happy with that payment to be made at this time as it will send your main account into credit. You blink to pay; the payment goes through. Alternatively, you just speak to the aggregator and ask it to move funds from your savings account to cover the large bill.
In other words, it’s a completely interactive conversation.
Oh, and then there’s also the ability to find information. “Where was that payment made on May 26 and what for?” “Show me the store I was in when I bought Calvin Klein jeans”; “Who did I have dinner with at Nando’s last week?”
The world is moving to one where money thinks for you … have I mentioned this before?