PYMNTS-MonitorEdge-May-2024

Balance Money Debuts Digital Banking Service

Balance Money has rolled out a digital banking service, to help offer financial insights geared to younger customers, a press release said Thursday (Sept. 1).

The digital banking service will offer automated real-time spend management to help people avoid “the mental gymnastics of looking at their bank account to figure out how much money is safe to spend.”

Balance Money said its new service will help fix budgeting issues, as most banks lack a budgeting solution. And the company noted that other budgeting apps have no financial control and require relinking, and don’t allow real-time visibility.

When a user gets paid using Balance Money’s new service, the app will help them divide the paycheck based on upcoming bills, savings goals and budgeted spending.

Digital banking has seen evolutions in the past few years, with mobile banking becoming more popular.

Read more: Bank Earnings Show Great Digital, Mobile Shift Is Unstoppable

In July, PYMNTS wrote that JPMorgan had seen 11% increase in active mobile customers, while Wells Fargo data was showing a 4% increase since the previous year, and Citi’s numbers showed a 14% increase in active mobile users since the same time last year.

The report noted that Citi said the end-of-period digital deposits were $20 billion at the end of the quarter, a jump of 20% from the previous year.

The digital shift chronicled by PYMNTS has shown that around 6 in 10 customers, or 59%, across 11 different countries had been using some kind of mobile banking. The report noted that “the availability of attractive mobile banking alternatives to brick-and-mortar banking — coupled with the widespread availability of smartphones — drives both adoption and usage, and an increase in their overall CE Index ranking.”

And spending for credit and debit spending was healthy across the board, with 15% growth for JPMorgan and 18% for Citi.

PYMNTS-MonitorEdge-May-2024