What problem does this attempt to solve? Their slack example doesn't seem particularly pressing.
Think of things like the introduction of cars, or the internet. Their actual effect on most people weren't a matter of obvious problems they had at the time.
Cars weren't released out of the blue by a well-funded startup as a half-baked MVP, they were built off of advances in industrial metallurgy, the invention of the engine, engineering used in trains and boats. Similarly, the internet didn't just happen - people first figured out electrical engineering, circuit boards, GUI's, COBOL and C++ and a myriad of other languages that made it possible to invent the internet.
I'm not saying that this online bank thingie is on that level yet. But for me, these kind of inventions are indicative of the death of institutional finance. The first step in destroying global finance as an institution is to whittle away at where the banks can make profit. Apps like Robin Hood have already helped to decentralize knowledge and participation in the stock market. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have shown at least a proof of concept that you don't need central banks to have currency. Money transfer apps like TransferWise eliminate currency conversion profiteering. Now what happens when you make a front-end that can wire all of these ideas together? A cashless society? Maybe.
I would also say that if you'd told people about those problems thirty years ago, people might have responded 'but I can already communicate with my team using a conference call' and 'I can already sell items through the classified or flea market'. 'What new problems are these things solving?'
I think that most inventions don't do anything particularly new - the kinds of individual tasks you can do with them could have been done before. What they tend to do is provide greater efficiency. And greater efficiency at scale enables new kinds of things to happen.
E.g. think of youtube. It was possible for people to share videos before the internet. E.g. you could have submitted a description of your video to a printed catalogue, and if people wanted to watch it they'd contact you via the catalogue, so you could send them a copy on VHS. What youtube and the internet does is makes it so much easier -- so much more efficient -- that it makes it practical, and the scale enables all sorts of new things to crop up on top of it.
I like to immediately take 10% of my pay check off the top for my savings account and investments. As a contractor, I also needed to take money out on my own for taxes. My hours are variable and I was getting paper checks.
Being able to just deposit my check and have a script run that automatically takes care of all of that would be great.
Or build your own rules to deny certain transactions if you are approaching 0 balance.
I think there are lots of use cases you could think of that are custom to you that no bank would ever build.
Something like this API may make basic income more feasible if we could ensure that people aren't able to blow their budget and go hungry even with basic income.
A traditional bank can't cater to every persons individual needs/wants.
It would be nice to have somewhere these scripts are discoverable so you can use/tweak other users ideas.
Having payments from clients automatically set-aside tax money would be great, too.
Bank have been very very reluctant to open their systems via API access, which is why there are services like Yodlee. Basic charge is around $20k per annum plus pay per use. They are making a LOT of money, but the service is imperfect because they work by screen scraping the data from bank accounts. They have some direct integrations with banks, but my understanding is that the vast majority is still done via scraping. From end user perspective its terrible - you have to give them your login credentials, and supply OTP/2FA (if your bank uses this) every time you want to pull data in.
The banking industry is being dragged kicking and screaming to modernise and offer proper API access like this.
Or for companies who would like a processing pipeline that treat customer's orders once their wire payment arrive (send a confirmation email, activate the product, ...).
Or of course like their snippet shows, for hip companies who want to post activities events on their social powered feed, because "bob bought bagels" is the information you need live at the office !
The only real answer is privacy, but I would just use BTC instead of USD if I wanted privacy anyway, and BTC is already programmable.
If you have a BoA, Chase, Citi, and Fidelity account, then unless there's a push towards exposing data for third party uses your only option becomes trying to look at 4 dashboards.
To illustrate only one problem. There's also others, including portability: what can you take with you when you decide to switch your 10 year old BoA account to another bank?
ymmv, of course
The ability to aggregate the data from all my accounts would be amazing...
My bank doesn't have this, so that's one reason.
Another would be that a third-party could write the code that performs the analysis, you should be able to just download (or purchase, I suppose) their script and use it, so you don't have to do it yourself anyway. This also means it becomes possible to have competition within this space, right now, you can only ever use your bank's analysis tools, if they're great, fine whatever good for you. But for some people it'll have limitations one way or another. Competition is not a bad thing.
Besides, it can be fun to look at your financial data with your programming tools. It's an interesting data set to play around with, analysis, data visualization, budgeting, even if just for learning.
I'd be able to take in paychecks and other income into a primary account, pay bills and distribute the rest into various accounts (for example, Eating out, Entertainment, Books, Learning, etc) according to some budget. Then I'd like to be able to see how much money I have left on any of these in pretty much real time.
Once you go up to the limit of one of these cards, then you know you've gone over budget. Half-way through the month, you have no more money for Entertainment? Too bad. I think this kind of thing would make it easier to practically stay within your budget.
Wanna go on a holiday? Boom, make a Holiday account, put a certain amount of money on it, and then you know you can spend that much on whatever, while everything else remains constant.
Holiday gift season? Make a budget, make a card, and spend from there, knowing that it's just a bigger hassle to use another card if you run out of gift money.
But I think the problem it's attempting to solve is that without Root a bank must implement any kind of features that you may want, Root you allows you to implement any features you want.
Although I can't decide whether this is an amazing thing, or a terrible terrible thing.
edit: I didn't see the Uber example, so I was working off an incorrect premise. It actually makes sense.
How would that work in real life? Uber doesn't charge you before your ride is complete, and at that point your payment would bounce, and now you're in trouble.
Ditto for fast-food diet; nobody's going to be happy when you walk up to the counter at 16 Handles with your big bucket of ice cream and your card doesn't go through.
I suppose the idea is to keep all of this in mind, but it still seems odd.
But you're right - someone will come up with an interesting use case for it. (My first idea was a card for my kid, so they can only make $10 worth of in-game purchases a month.)
Well in the Uber example you're allowing payments to Uber, not denying them.
But you do have a very good point about denying pay-after-use type transactions, I'm not really sure what they're doing about that.
That's the one I was thinking of, note the "lets her take as many Uber rides as she needs".
I kid, the possibility of putting spending rules as code is neat.
2. Fraud detection.
3. Real-time reporting.