Accounted For

A clean and clutter-free view of all your bank accounts in one app.

The Problem:

I really wanted an app that could show me all my banking accounts, without silly insights or credit card offers. Every time I open up Mint, or Clarity Money, or Nerd Wallet it’s filled with bloatware that I just don’t care for. I’ve done customer interviews and a Qualtric’s survey with panelists and found that I was not the only one who felt this way.

My role and constraints:

What do people really want when they are looking at their accounts? From my user interviews, and the collected survey data I received, the consensus was that simple is better. But how simple? 30% of people still felt there were some important features, like seeing all the transactions on a per-account basis and easily linking all your bank accounts within the app.

A constraint we have is that we need to use a third-party to easily add all the accounts. It is a service called PLAID. It is a banking API that allows users to sign on to their bank, investment, and credit accounts. This makes it difficult to easily give this service for free, because you need to pay for Plaid. So we needed to work out the strategy of how we would monetize the app to pay for the API costs.

Conclusions:
I learned from my research that navigation is critical, so that you can see relevant information at a glance. I opted for a fluid, gesture-driven interface. Up and down to switch between cash, credit, and investments, with a final page to show an overview of each, and to manage your account. To add an account with the Plaid API, all you need to do is click the plus button at the top of the overview page, and it will allow you to search in an open text field for your account. Plaid will then authenticate and run the security measures to fully link the account, and it will show up in the app in the appropriate category, whether it be a cash, credit, or investment account.

Accounted For is in the development process and will be available on the App Store for iOS soon. Some of the constraints for working with Plaid as our third party API for account authentication are still be worked out. But the app looks promising and I am happy with the research that I have been able to collect, and seeing how it turns into a very intuitive and performant way to manage all your accounts.