The 10 best personal finance apps - Features - Gadgets & Tech. £0.69, iPhone This is a great one if you've just got a new job and want to figure out how much money you have after tax, student loan, pension contributions and the like. Simply put in your gross salary and it works out the rest. 2. Toshl Finance Free, iPhone Toshl, with its little "savings monsters" and easy-to-use budget planner really comes into its own when you take it abroad: allowing you to track spending in the currency and do conversion calculations. 3. . £1.99, iPhone Understand all your little daily expenses and not-so-little monthly outgoings in a visual way with Money Smart, which provides statistics and graphics to display your cash flow. 4.
Saving for a house? 5. Free, Android, iPhone This app has it all. 6. A simple, accessible app that allows you to budget across weeks, months and years. 7. Getting your expenses done has never been so easy – this app allows you to take a snap and turn your receipts digital, compile a report and email the PDF to your boss. 8. Android, £5.99 9. 10. Consumers will pay for better online banking. PwC conducted research with almost 3,000 banking customers from a range of segments across markets to discover their expectations of banking in the digital age. They selected both emerging and developing markets including China, India, Mexico and the UAE, as well as developed markets like the UK, Canada, France and Poland. The research revealed that there is a very high correlation between digital engagement and share of wallet for a customer, and that digitally active customers tended to have the largest product holdings. They also found that if you are the primary financial relationship then this drives increased share of wallet leading to higher revenue generation.
That’s no shock is it? What may be a shock are the results of the willingness of customers to pay for new and enhanced digital services. All in all, an interesting survey and worth a glance, particularly for those of us who believe banks have an opportunity to gain increased client wallet share by innovating digital channels. Free Checking Isn t Cheap for Banks. For banks, free checking is many things — but it isn't free. Despite a public perception that taking deposits is a can't-lose business, maintaining a checking account costs banks between $250 to $450 a year. In many cases those accounts aren't even turning a profit. The average checking account cost banks $349 in 2011, says Mike Moebs of Moebs Services Inc, a research firm. But the average revenue per account is just $268, implying a loss of $81. That equation helps explain the thinking behind some of the recent, highly-controversial steps banks have taken to raise the prices their customers pay for checking accounts.
"Banking is a subsidized business," says Hank Israel, a partner at New York-based consulting firm Novantas LLC, pointing to the fact that the profitable accounts balance out those accounts maintained at a loss. "When the plane flies full, coach covers the whole cost and first class is the profit," Israel says. The issue comes down to efficiency and economies of scale. Why Are There No Price Wars in Consumer Financial Services? Maybe the insightful Freaknomics boys can explain this to me, because I don't get it. The Dodd-Frank bill (also known, felicitously, as the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009) is eliminating a whole armada of bank and credit charges, ranging from over-draft fees to debit charges. These hidden fees made billions for the banks--representing as much as 15% of their profits and costing unwitting consumers the same. The numbers are so staggering that Bank of America wrote off $7.6 in anticipation of the hit they were going to take.
Unsurprisingly, to recoup some of these lost profits, banks are responding by dreaming up a new armada of fees that are compliant with regulation. "Some are raising minimum payments on certain customers' accounts in order to increase late penalties. Consumer banking is--or at least should be -- a high volume, low margin business anyway, so why not build a big, loyal, less-but-still-profitable customer base with a lower-free promise?