Context
Far away is the time when you would keep your money burried in your background. Nowadays, each and everyone of us is dependant on a bank to store our money. Through the overdraft system, your bank actually enables you to get a "short term loan". However, as useful as it may be in certain circumstances, this kind of loan doesn't come cheap, as it usually holds very high interest rates (between 8% and 20%), even bigger when you go over the agreed upon amount, or leave it running for a long time.
Therefore, it can be very upsetting when one of these four scenarios occur to you :
- Scenario 1 : you realize at the end of the month that you went way past your overdraft allowance and got yourself a lot of agios. And for what? Just to buy some shoes you could actually have bought the next month, all this because you didn't keep close enough track of your account.
- Scenario 2 : you have your card refused at the cash desk of your supermarket during peak hours and with all your bags loaded with food due to your bank blocking your credit card after a huge overreach.
- Scenario 3 : you just got overdraft by a few euros without knowing for a few days, and it will cost you plenty. It might be the most frustrating one.
- Scenario 4 : you got your 15-year-old teenager a bank account, and he proved really bad at managing it because he never looks at his app. You are always asked to pick up the pieces and you have no overview on what he does with it.
Don't worry, you can stop freaking out now. All of these bad outcomes are a matter of organization and budget management. And the good news is : we have THE solution for you.
Our app
Our solution could be a new feature plugged to the Linxo app. The app as it is allows you to have the info of all your bank accounts in one place and has a system of notifications and e-mails that allows you to keep track of your activities in real time. As such, you can configure it any way you want, for instance to warn you when you had an incoming or outcoming transfers, when your balance is low and so on. You can also group your periodical expenses, name them and so on, in order to organize your budgets better, and you are provided with statistics.
This app seems like a pretty good solution for account management. However some people don't like to receive notifications, and e-mails are not always as accessible as text messages. Besides, if you have configured your notifications to keep you alerted of a lot of different infos, you might get overwhelmed and overlook them, which would prove counterproductive.
Thus, we could create an applet that would send texts to the user and to any other person choosed (for instance parents of a teenager) regarding his overdraft. The person could choose the frequency, the amounts, ... For instance :
- The user could configure several phone numbers and a "safety figure" when approching a negative balance (let's say 10euros). Whenever one of the accounts reaches around 10 euros, the persons receive a text saying "Careful, your balance has reached 10 euros."
- The user could receive a text when the balance gets under 0
- The user could receive a text when reaching half the limit of the authorized overdraft.
- The user could receive a text when getting past the limit of the authorized overdraft.
- The user could receive a text when you get past the 30-days limit in a situation of overdraft.
Our targets
This feature would be particularly adapted to 3 types of targets :
Teenagers
- Looking for independance
- Not particularly good at money management
- Glued to their phones but not encline to spend a lot of time on their banking app
- Trust and control are the pre-requisites for their parents to open an account for them
Working young adults/
students
- Digital natives used to quick and easy interfaces
- Very busy ==> few time to consult their app
- No money to waste for anything other than meaningful experiences
- Need to monitor their expenses carefully
How to code it?
First we need to create an IFTTT applet using a webhook :
- Register or create your account and click on "New Applet"
- Click on "+this" to select your trigger
- Search & select "Webhooks"
- Click on the "connect" button
- Click on "receive a web request"
- Name your event "overdraft situation" & click on "create trigger"
- Click on "+that" to select the action to accomplish
- Search & select "sms" and choose "send a sms"
- Enter the phone number (in this case linxo would have to ask the user of the app the number he wishes to use)
- Click on "create action" and "finish"
NB : we might need more than one applet in order to complete all the "triggering events" listed earlier e.g. a text when you have been in overdraft for more than 30 days.
To know more :
IFTTT Documentation
The Ultimate IFTTT Guide
Then you need to code the event that will action your webhook as well as the "values" you want to add (in this case it allows the company to set the content of the text).
Let's imagine that the account balance is encapsulated into a variable "var balance".
