Someone asked me the other week whether Lucie Money is basically another banking app, which is a fair question. On the surface it’s not a stupid description: Lucie connects to your accounts, shows you your money and helps you to do things. You can even access it on your phone.
But Lucie is different to standard banking apps and my answer to the question was “absolutely not; that’s the one thing I’m determined it won’t be”.
I want to explain why.
Most people have several finance apps on their phone. Maybe their main bank; another bank (or two) for other stuff; a super fund app that they don’t look at too often; perhaps a couple of buy-now-pay-later things. Yours will be different, but you’ll have your own assortment.
The thing is that while these apps differ in all sorts of ways, underneath they’re built to much the same design: here’s your data, now you work out what to do with it. And so you might have access to transaction lists, spending breakdowns, budget trackers, charts, etc. All of which is built to show you your situation in lots of detail, then hand the actual work back to you.
That kind of app is a place you go. But going somewhere to check your money is exactly the thing most of us don’t get around to. And it’s not that we don’t care; we all do. But life is just busy, and a screen full of transactions is just not exciting, no matter how important they are. So what happens more often than not is that the app sits there, unopened, full of things you probably should know. Last month Augusta and I found that out the hard way: a weird transaction sat in our joint account for six months, in plain view, because neither of us checked it out.
So the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to think the whole design is backwards. We keep building better and better places for people to go and check their money, when the actual problem is that people don’t want to go and check their money. A better dashboard is still a dashboard. You’ve still got to remember it’s there, open it, read it and decide what to do. For most people, most of the time, that just doesn’t happen.
Another standard banking app would be just another one of those. I want something closer to the opposite: something that does the checking for you, and comes to you when there’s a reason to.
And so that’s what we’re building Lucie to be. It’s designed to:
- keep an eye on your accounts in the background
- make sense of what’s going on
- get in touch when something actually matters.
When you do have a question, you’ll be able to just ask. Most of the time, though, you shouldn’t have to.
Lucie will still have a screen, obviously, and you’ll be able to open it and look whenever you like. But looking won’t be the point of it.
This is a much harder thing to build than a dashboard. A dashboard only has to show you things accurately, which is hard enough. Watching on your behalf means first working out what’s actually worth watching, which is a different order of problem. The hard part is knowing what’s important in the context of your life, without turning it into one more stream of alerts you stop reading.
So that’s what we’re building. We’re early stage, so a long way to go. But the end is pretty clear: not another standard banking app. There are enough of those already.
There’s a waitlist at lucie.money.