Disruptive Banking: A First Peek at BankSimple
The Internet has surely brought some major disruption to how banks do business, but there is still a lot of potential for disruption in that market. BankSimple aims to do just this by giving you debit card and credit cards, but without being a bank itself. Instead, it acts as an intermediary between you and other bank(s). Thanks to this, for example, it can seamlessly move your money around between different banks to maximize your interest rates without you having to deal with this. Until now, we only got small glances at what the final product would look like, but today, the company posted a longer demo video that shows off the service’s webapp and explains the ideas behind the product in more detail.
Judging from this demo, BankSimple will indeed provide its users with a different way of interacting with their bank accounts. Not only does the service offer some smart ways to categorize your transactions, but you can also use natural language queries to search for old transactions (“food in Portland,” “food more than $50”).
BanksSimple also focuses more on giving you a better idea of what you can spend and not so much on your balances. There are also tools to plan for future spending. You basically just tell BankSimple how much you want to save and when you need it and it will go out to its network of banks and put it into the right type of account to help you get to this goal.
As the company’s co-founder Josh Reich notes in this demo, the idea behind BankSimple is to “take age-old banking concepts and make them more relatable to how everyone thinks about their money. We shouldn’t have to do math in front of the computer but have the computer do that for us.”
Take a look at the video below and let us know what you think:
