Shower Thoughts: Why do I still have to remember to pay bills?
It's 2022. My phone should be providing personal reports on my personal finances—telling me if I can afford a purchase, bill payments, and yield opportunities from cashflow.
Thoughts
Got home last night with warm greetings from my internet provider, “Hi, your account is overdue. Is everything OK?” All good until now, thanks.
I can hail a driver with a button, but bill payments haven’t changed. Locally we have direct debit or auto charges. But what about overseas expenses or subscriptions?
While on the topic of bills, what about personal finance?
What’s my budget for the week?
How much have I saved?
How much should I save?
Who has the best rates?
What are investment opportunities?
How do I optimize my taxes?
I have yet to find a solution as optimal and comprehensive as the Google spreadsheet…
If I had to guess, the challenge lies in legacy infrastructure for banking and payments. The cost to connect old global systems for personal finance probably isn’t worth it.
Banks use system X, but my internet provider uses system Y. Working on X+Y and maintaining that is okay. But a viable service can’t stop at Y. It needs A, B, C… You can see how this problem quickly becomes uneconomical.
Idea
So, what if connecting systems and apps was easier? A LOT easier. In web3, that’s called ‘composability’ and integrating apps are as easy as connecting lego blocks.
There are already asset management apps in web3 like Zapper and Zerion. If you deposit your funds into their dashboard, they’ll recommend investment options (called DeFi, decentralized finance, but that’s for another post).
A missing piece is integrating web3 to expenses, subscriptions, etc. Potentially possible with crypto credit cards, but that would require connecting legacy systems.
These ‘adaptors’ that bridge legacy systems to the blockchain is probably a viable business already. But in time, the ideal solution would be to plug directly into the blockchain to enable much more convenient integrations.
As adoption for web3 tech increases, more financial services will become composable and, like lego blocks, just work by stacking them on top of each other. Hopefully we’ll get to a point where I’ll never forget to pay my bills.