Want your Amazon Echo to play Money, Money, Money every time you get paid? Or for your debit card to automatically record every purchase you make on a budgeting spreadsheet? Well, challenger bank Monzo is making a move to become the UK's first smart bank and is using If This Then That (IFTTT) to connect your account to a host of other services.
Monzo's integration with IFTTT lets people build mini ‘applets’ by setting a series of personalised rules automatically triggered by actions in the real world. This is the first time that a bank has linked-up with IFTTT to connect their bank account with a range of other apps and devices.
The possibilities this opens up range from the mundane to the bizarre. You could, for instance, set up an applet that automatically puts a pound into a digital swear jar every time you press an internet-connected button on your desk. Or you could create an applet that rewards you with £5 every time you visit the gym, or adds a track to a Spotify playlist when you spend money at a certain shop. Future versions of the integration will let people set up an applet that flashes their lights every time they get paid.
“We always wanted to give people whatever kind of personal finance management that they wanted,” says Simon Vans-Colina, a Monzo engineer who led the the development of the integration. Students could put their entire student loan into a pot and pay it out to themselves every month, Vans-Colina says. “But if you support Chelsea you could say that every time they score a goal it could automatically put an extra £5 in your drinking fund.”
If you’re a Monzo user you can set up your own applet by registering for an account with IFTTT. Then head to the ‘my applets’ page and select ‘new applet’. You then start building the applet by selecting Monzo, choosing a trigger, such as spending money at a certain shop, and picking another app that will respond when that trigger is fired. You could, for example, trigger a tweet from your account every time you shop at H&M or flip the applet so money goes from your Monzo account into a clothes pot when you tweet about H&M.
Monzo has also put together a collection of pre-built applets that users can sync with their accounts. These let you automatically round up all purchases to the nearest pound and deposit the extra into a savings pot, send attached receipts to Expensify or log calories into the iOS health app when you buy a coffee.
But Vans-Colina expects the really interesting applets to come from Monzo’s 650,000 users. Any of them can now create their own applet that links the challenger bank to any of the 600 services that currently work with IFTTT, including Spotify, Alexa and Instagram.
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“We need to make sure that people who cannot code are able to achieve the same thing as those who can right now,” says Kieran McHugh, a Monzo engineer who also worked on the project.
Until very recently, attempts at opening up banking in this way have moved at a near-glacial place. “There was a wall around your current account – you could only do very limited things though your bank's web interface,” says Vans-Colina.
But in January 2018, the EU’s Open Banking directive forced big banks to liberate their databases and allow startups and other companies to build services on top of that data. And while Open Banking was great news for companies who could now build their own money dashboards, it hasn’t done much yet to give individuals more control other their money. IFTTT is one way to get around this.
“IFTTT gives all the power of open banking API to ordinary people,” says Vans-Colina. It could also give Monzo hints about the kind of tools they might want to build into the app. “If one applet turns out to be particularly popular then that could inform our product decisions,” McHugh says.
The only thing that the Monzo/IFTTT integration won’t let you do is make payments out of a Monzo account. It would be pretty dangerous if someone set up an applet that accidentally sent their entire paycheque out of the their Monzo account, McHugh says, so Monzo users can only move money into or out of ‘pots’ within the app.
The tie-up with IFTTT comes after Monzo was granted a full banking license in April 2017. Since then, the challenger bank has been switching all of its existing and new users onto full bank accounts that can accept direct debits and salary payments. Once that process had finished, Vans-Colina returned to the IFTTT project that he had been thinking about since he joined Monzo just after it launched three years ago. After starting the project in his spare time, Vans-Colina and his team built the integration over ten days.
Now, Vans-Colina hopes the link with IFTTT will let ordinary users build their own tools to automatically manage their money. “We’re not launching one thing, we’re launching infinite things all in one go,” he says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
