The last decade has brought about countless technological disruptions that have changed the way we think about and manage our financial lives. Through it all, Millennials and Generation Z have been able to ride the wave and absorb change as it happens, incorporating many of these new tech solutions into their own lives. While much has evolved in the consumer retail and messaging app space, tech savvy consumers also expect their financial service providers to embrace and lead in these disruptions as well. No longer satisfied with a one-size-fits-all approach (that never really fit everyone anyway), consumers today want individualized insights, recommendations, and experiences. Something that would usually only happen through one-on-one interactions with a fellow human being – but thanks to artificial intelligence and massive data analytics capabilities, these types of interactions can now happen through virtual assistants or chatbots accessed through your mobile phone. Financial Insights Application Programming Interface (API) Katy Gibson, VP, Product Application, and Liz Hawkins, Associate Product Manager, Fintech, of Envestnet | Yodlee ® recently spoke at the FinovateFall in New York City about our new Financial Insights API during a demo session. The Financial Insights API provides developers with the ability to create apps and experiences that enable a deep and comprehensive look at a customer's spending, earnings, savings and budgeting. The type of experience that is tailored to provide unique insights that empower a consumer to take action on their financial wellness. Experiences can be created that are tailored to all sorts of different walks of life – from a mother keeping track of their children’s spending, to a hard-working person engaged in the gig economy. This new set of intelligent APIs can have a serious impact on how people spend, save, borrow and plan. By using the Envestnet | Yodlee transactional data enrichment capabilities and financial analytics AI algorithms, different transactions can be placed in different buckets to help consumers see exactly what they're spending their money on, and even monitor whether that spending is over, under, or in line with the budget limits set for each category. Users can monitor their spending on groceries, rent, and utilities, or even take a dive deep into the smaller, more specific types of spending, like restaurants, coffee shops, ride sharing, movies, and streaming entertainment. Katy and Liz demonstrated several different examples of how our Financial Insights APIs can help people look at exactly the areas of spending they want to monitor. With access to over 21,000+ data sources, users can seamlessly analyze their transactions, understand important details about their spending to begin sorting and placing every transaction into different budgetary categories. This can be especially useful for managing certain recurring expenses, like subscription services you may have forgotten you signed up for. For example, the Financial Insights API can look at all your monthly subscriptions, from your gym to your streaming entertainment, from your grocery delivery to your trunk club, and show you which ones you have paid for the month, and which ones are coming up. How to Better Think About and Manage Your Finances Consumers can then take that underlying data and marry it with a savings account and see things like how much you could save and earn if you would cancel certain subscriptions. Plus, the API can even enable experiences that compare your spending in certain key areas, like streaming entertainment, and compare it to people in your area and across the United States. During the FinovateFall demonstration, Katy and Liz showed an example where a parent of a teenage gamer can monitor spending habits and be alerted when their teen goes over a set spending limit. This can help parents have an important conversation with their teenager about budgeting and spending wisely, helping that young person learn valuable financial lessons at an early age while it's still safe to make mistakes. They even showed how easy the potential is to create a personalized dashboard. They used an example that had actually been put together by a Lyft driver that monitored her earnings vs. spending – everything from gas, car insurance, car loans, repairs, and even tolls. This type of intuitive experience can give a rideshare driver an incredibly useful view of their net income. "Consumers are looking for tailored financial insights that help analyze personal scenarios and identify financial pain points," said Brandon Rembe, SVP of Products at Envestnet | Yodlee in a press release. "Our goal here is to provide insight-driven APIs to financial institutions and FinTech so they can create more personalized apps and deliver more meaningful insights to their customers in an effort to improve their overall financial wellness. These insights also offer the potential for consumers to compare their financial behavior to those in a relevant peer group for even more custom recommendations." Consumers now expect financial institutions and fintech providers to harness the same type of hyper-personalized capabilities that give individual recommendations and experiences from some of the most powerful and widely-used platforms out there. Through Envestnet | Yodlee’s APIs, we’re showing financial institutions and FinTechs that the tools to create those experiences can easily be at their fingertips. If you would like to learn how to use our Financial Insights API in your own financial institution or FinTech app or web portal, please visit the Yodlee developer site or contact us with any questions.
