A little start-up called Simple, is now launching it's service ( also named Simple ). Simple is a service that they pitch as "A better bank". What the service consists of is a custom Simple Visa card and a mobile ( and web ) application for interfacing with your account. The app lets your check your current account balance, your purchases and economical goals. The user gets a push notification whenever a purchase is made with the Visa, and the user can then add a comment, picture, tags and a category to the purchase. All this is used to map out what the user spends their money on, and they're able to search based on their tags ( like searching for purchases with the tag 'pet' ). As their introductory video states: "Your spending tells a history". Users can set up allocations of money that they can assign to certain things to manage their spendings. The app has a feature called Safe-to-Spend™, listing how much you have to currently spent based on your planned expenses, these money can be moving into user created goals which could be things like 'vacation', 'new computer' or 'birthday party'.
All this seems like very intuitive way of managing your economics, and will probably help keep track of things, especially because of the ease of doing it. But it also might seem a little to good to be true. On their site, the developers of Simple claim that there are no surprise-fees, and that basing a business on the notion of profiting on your costumers screwing up ( that is what banks basically do ), sounds like a non consumer-friendly way of doing things. They're being relatively vague about their business model though, they state that:
"Simple does not profit from fees."
"The few fees we do charge only cover our actual costs"
So we assume that means something like a monthly fee for using their service. How much that fee is going to be is not stated on their website at the time of this article being written. Which might be a little worrying, but we'll have to wait and see.
The thing that makes this work is their special Simple Visa, which they say works with over 55 000 ATMs in US ( using AllPoint ). But we're still not quite sure if it is fully compatible with credit-card technology currently deployed in stores. Currently Simple is US only, which is a bit of a shame. If this works out for them though, they might also spread to Europe.
This is probably the direction banking will go, the question is if Simple, as the first generation will be the one to succeed in this. There is a lot that can go wrong, but it seems like an interesting idea that can make our economical life more accessible and easier to manage properly.