In my view, one of the best contributions of the Finovate conference held in London was the presentation of YouWealth’s Money Hub. This opinion was obviously shared by many other participants as the demo received one of the coveted Best of Show awards.
Money Hub is a financial planning tool that gives users a very clear overview of their total financial situation. The service, which is currently only available in England, aggregates data from all of the bank accounts specified by the user into an overall view that significantly excels most other PFM tools: In addition to the spending and income perspective, you can, for example, also define savings targets and include wealth and debt data. Of course, manual entries can also be made, in addition to the use of account data.
In my view, however, the highlights are sophisticated simulation options: You can integrate assumptions on future wealth developments in a very flexible way so that you can determine and display, for example, the expected wealth at retirement. You can take into account special expenditure, plan major purchases and calculate expected cash flows.
Moreover, you can make individual parts of plans and, in particular, simulations selectively accessible to other persons. For example, you can develop and modify old-age provision scenarios together with your financial planner and make targeted savings or investment decisions on the basis of much more detailed information.
What is more, the product clearly presents all the information and looks great—of course, not only on the web, but also on your tablet and smart phone. This makes financial planning fun!
For many banks, such a tool can almost be considered the target picture of financial planning (that still is frequently presented on paper). In spite of the high autonomy of customers in using Money Hub, they can involve their advisor any time. As a result, advisors can get a fairly clear picture of the goals and wishes of their customers and, above all, can position themselves as active advisors of their customers again and again. And that role is precisely what almost all “advice-focused banks” aim to achieve in the long term.
The Finovate demo video gives a nice overview of the core functions of Money Hub.
