Budget Manager Feature Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2024

We’ve made it our mission for every Standard Bank customer to be empowered with the knowledge, information, and know-how to make better daily financial decisions that can compound over time and lead to living better lives tomorrow and building better futures for the next generations.

Unfortunately, the typical South African spends more than they earn every month and 90% of the population don’t save enough for retirement. Our customers understand the importance of spending smarter, but the tools to help them do this, while keeping them disciplined to staying the course, has been limited. Offered typically by tech start-ups, existing budgeting tools in the market require customers to share their banking passwords, an area of concern in a market rife with fraud opportunists.

Understanding that certain parts of our market where community banking is built on high trust, we focused on reframing the way customers chose to interact with Standard Bank by creating the Budget Manager feature – shifting our relationship with customers from facilitators of transactions to providers of valuable money insights.

Through the Budget Manager feature, customers gain access to a budgeting tool that allows them to: - Set and track their budget - Consolidate transactions across various accounts held with Standard Bank - Gain access to a pre-populated budget - View historical data, to encourage realistic budget setting - Customise their budget start date - View their expense transactions by nature of spend i.e. categorisation - View of their total expected income

Standard Bank’s Budget Manager feature, forms part of our overall Personal Financial Management offering to our retail customers and is available through our Standard Bank mobile banking application. The feature is currently offered to customers at no charge and can be accessed even if the customer has no data. This allows us to reach any customer, who is interested in developing better money management habits, irrespective of the income.

The development of Budget Manager entailed navigating a complex organisational structure, typical to an incumbent bank, spanning across customer solutioning, design, mobile application development, data science and data engineering.

Since our launch in 2023, the initial results have been encouraging: - Organically attracting approx. 40k users to the feature, despite budgeting being perceived as a fairly sophisticated and complicated aspect of managing your finances - Achieving a 4 out 5 star customer rating