The Experience Design Scout

Qash is will be a Dutch community website that allows people to better understand how they spend their money. People can share tips or give advice to each other how to make better financial decisions. Another component is that people are able to create financial goals and track how well they do in reaching them. By uploading your bank statements from your main bank(s), and categorizing / tagging expenses, you can compare your spending with others. It is basically the Dutch Wesabe, Mint, or Geezeo.

To give subscribers the best experience, Qash should:

• Allow people to compare against peers, not just everybody. To understand better how I am doing financially, I’d prefer to compare my spending with people who have similar demographics such as education, income and age. I am not really interested how big the monthly mortgage payment is of fifty-year-olds or how many Euros teenagers put aside every month. I am curious to know the percentage of people with similar age and income who invest more than me and how this impacts the speed in which I reach my financial goals (just like Pertuity’s Dare To Compare function).
• Give proactive advice. Qash would really rock if it can make us all smarter in making financial decisions. From my research at Forrester I know that just 4 out of 10 consumers like to do their own research before making any financial purchase. The main reason is that financial services is a boring, difficult and tricky topic — still a lot of consumers simply don’t trust banks and insurers. Qash has therefor a great opportunity to link community-generated tips and ‘did you know’s?’ to my personal situation. So, alert me when more and more people are buying their TVs at MediaMarkt, or recommend opening a savings account at a specific firm when you see my account balance grow with a certain amount each month.
• Build tools that are useful. Useful means a) tell me how I am doing and b) what I should be doing to improve. Just last week someone pointed me to Barclays’ new ‘Little Extras Calculator’. Like many other online tools, it looks pretty and is built as a rich-internet application. But – unfortunately also like many tools – it is useless: I’m not getting any smarter, the product recommendations are based on ones of that firm only, and I can’t store what I have done. So, Qash, please create a savings calculator that shows me in one graph the end sum that I can expect when staying with my current bank compared with switching to any other bank.

Banks – are you listening?