Wells Fargo Launching Mobile App Feature So Users Can Track Subscriptions

Wells Fargo is launching a feature on its mobile app that will allow its customers to find where they’ve shared their payment information and whether it’s via a device, mobile wallet or an online retailer, so they can track down an unwanted subscription.

According to a news report from Fortune, the feature — dubbed “Control Tower” — will gradually roll out to the company’s 28 million mobile users beginning in 2018.

The goal of Control Tower is to help users keep track of their personal finance via the various subscription services to which they elect into every month (think Netflix, Spotify, Birchbox, Zipcar, etc.). Future versions of Wells Fargo’s feature will also allow the user to more fully control all their payments, in part by helping a user stop them. From the mobile app, users will one day be able to eliminate a subscription or stop sharing their credit card information with a website, app or device, all with the swipe of a finger.

“When you think about our customers or any of you, you’ve put your payments information in a lot of different places,” Wells CEO Tim Sloan said at this week’s Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado. “What happens when you want to make a change to that credit card or debit card? You say to yourself, where in the heck have I put everything?”

However, not all of Control Tower’s functions will get in the way of commerce. If a customer’s card expires or is re-issued, they will be able to push the data for the new card out to retailers and mobile wallets through the Wells Fargo App.

All of these more advanced features will come later on as Wells Fargo partners up with merchants and FinTech firms to create a network that will allow customers to securely share their financial information.

Control Tower comes at a time when Wells Fargo is still reeling from its fake accounts scandal, which came to light in mid-2016. And while consumers are going digital, they aren’t necessarily going to banking apps. By some estimates, U.S. consumers spend an average of about five hours on their phone each day —but they spend maybe 2 percent of that time on banking websites. Control Tower is one way for Wells Fargo consumers to control their personal finance relationships from within Wells Fargo’s app.

“We want to offer consumers convenience, as long as they come home,” Sloan said. “We want customers to have their financial relationship with Wells Fargo.”