I’m a tomorrow bank user from the very beginning and while it was a nice app for banking at the beginning it now feels more like it’s slowly dying a feature death.
Instead of having more meaningful features that help to achieve actual user goals like e.g. adding virtual debit cards, pockets with an IBAN etc., I now have some features I’m not sure how to deal with:
There is this whole Benefit page for a few discounts at some sustainable shops, but it feels off to combine a banking app with a coupon page or market place. Is it just me who feels like this is strange to have so dominant in there?
Then there is the Future page that I’m also not sure what value it adds. Like mentioned above pockets lack a lot of essentials and thus feel not so relevant. The same applies for the investment idea which is simply in there since quite some time but without being able to really use it.
The impact page I quite like but even there’s not much happening and a lot of content that has been there since years and does not change.
It feels strange to have an app blown up this much. It’s my personal opinion and a personal preference to have things simple and aligned with the utility of the service. And I’m writing this as someone who loves the idea of this bank and how it tackles this important topic and I’m even invested in it via the crowdfunding. So I write with good intention
Hey Mike. First of all welcome to the community forum! I’m glad you’ve written this post and are participating in the discussions here. What you’ve shared here is something that other users have also been mentioning in other threads in similar fashion. Let me explain briefly what’s going on behind the scenes.
Of course you can imagine that the whole Team at Tomorrow is not just enjoying the merits of the past. We’re actually constantly working to improve the app and the features we offer. Unfortunately especially in the banking section it is often a bit harder to implement new features because of legal requirements and the involvement of more than just one party. To give you an example: The benefits feature might involve many more partners, but the development itself was not as time consuming, because most companies have referral programs in place where we can just negotiate the conditions and then tag along. For the rounding up feature on the other side, there were some legal requirements that were not as easy to fulfill. We had to explore, for example, how to be legally safe with calculating the rounded up amount and then transferring it to the impact project. Since every amount that is rounded up means a sepa credit transfer to the impact project, we’d have to comply with Sepa rules. At first, we weren’t sure, whether we’d have to send you a TAN for every single transaction that was rounded up, in order to be able to transfer the money. You can probably see how there was a lot of back and forth getting this right in cooperation with our partner Solarisbank.
Like in this example, there are just features which are much more easy to implement and others where there is not only a lot of development work going into it, but also a lot of legal back and forth on making a feature bullet-proof.
That being said, we’re on a good path to the investment product and we’ve just started really digging into cash deposits via Barzahlen. There’s a lot of exciting things happening this year, so stay tuned and positive, that we’ll hopefully have a huge impact on the market soon.
My problem is that immature products come onto the market, „timely“ improvements are announced and then nothing happens for years.
The pockets and the joint accounts are a good example of this.
I think it’s good when products that are not yet fully developed are launched. I prefer that to waiting forever and not delivering anything.
However, I have more and more the feeling that Tomorrow is struggling with too many projects at the same time and is losing sight of its goals.
The pockets that exist now are perfectly cool, if then at the latest six months later the feedback of the community is accepted and implemented.
Only if after two? years, nothing has been implemented and other new products are torn up, then that’s a real shame.
Thanks for the nice answer Vinz. I really appreciate an open discussion and that you allow for the community to be part of this journey.
However, when I think about what you have written I must say, that it raises even more concerns and questions than letting them disappear.
Are you as a company really deciding which feature goes into the app only by its implementation effort? What about really solving problems? (no matter how hard)
It feels you are striving for output rather than meaningful outcomes in order to have something in the app. I’m all in for trying things and iterating them so please continue. But don’t forget the people using it. That means rethinking one’s position from time to time. And maybe I’m wrong and the benefits page is something people use heavily and not just the affiliate marketing page I see.
Then it’s on my side to shift my mind
I am puzzled by how this is what you got from Vinz’s answer. He was literally describing one project that was easy to implement and one project that was surprisingly complex.
From checking out Tomorrow’s Trello board, you can see that Tomorrow prioritized projects with high numbers of user votes in the past. Tomorrow is one of two fintechs that offer a solution for shared accounts in Germany for example –a feature many users voted for and that other fintechs seem to avoid because of its technical and regulatory complexity. Cash deposits and sustainable investments are two popular features Tomorrow is currently developing. Cash deposits is going to be relatively easy to implement. Solarisbank became a partner of Viacash, and implementing this is going to be relatively straightforward for Solarisbank customers. Investments on the other hand is more complex. Tomorrow is integrating a brokerage account into the app and manages its own equity fund that follows stricter sustainability requirements than currently available products.
I can totally understand that point and our expectation setting is always very enthusiastic, that’s for sure. We’re really looking to improve there. The only positive struggle we have is that there are so many great features we want to integrate that sometimes the enhancement of existing features is pushed back a while. It’s a real dilemma that I am sure all companies striving to stay on top of trends are facing.
Continiuing the above paragraph I can agree, that there the sheer number of projects we have in the pipeline is mind boggling. That much shouldn’t be a surprise I hope. Most likely we hope you will agree that many short to mid-term goals are dynamic rather than fixed and that many factors change that go into the decisions what will happen next. Needs of human beings change, stakeholder wishes change, markets change, regulatory requirements change etc. → I totally get that perceptions arise very easily. Sadly most of the time with anything one ponders, the reality is more complex and the angles of views one can take are extremely broad.
I apologize if that is the impression you took away from what I have written. We put a great deal of effort into this topic by now and have a dedicated hero working on nothing but trying to balance out the different stakeholder groups’ wishes and requests. So no, we look at it from many different angles.
I’m glad you’ve written this post and are participating in the discussions here. What you’ve shared here is something that other users have also been mentioning in other threads in similar fashion. Let me explain briefly what’s going on behind the scenes.
He was literally describing one project that was easy to implement and one project that was surprisingly complex.