13 ms·

The future of finance is self-driving money

90 points by venturegrit 7y ago

wizzwizz4 7y ago
This looks a lot like an advertisement. It's got over two screensful of "self-driving money is", like it's trying to drum a slogan into the mind of the reader.
jsinai 7y ago
> Here again we have misaligned incentives. Banks optimize revenue when customers have as much debt as possible. > While expensive to develop, the beauty of software is it can be infinitely replicated. And at scale, the marginal cost of one additional user approaches zero. So if I understand the article correctly, companies like Wealthfront can make money by signing up more users. Their technology scales so that marginal costs become zero and they earn an income from fees, so marginal profit also scales. But in the long term is this enough? Surely their also needs to be an alignment along the lines of savings: if users save more and if banks can benefit from this, then everyone would be doing it.
Unsimplified 7y ago
In a 2 person economy, if person A stops cycling money back (thru trade not debt), person B suffers. Something similar happens in a 300M person economy, so I agree, self driving money would be a great solution.
danans 7y ago
> 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and most Americans would struggle to cover an unexpected $400 expense. > How did we get here? > Why aren’t we doing better? > Managing Money is Hard We aren't here because millions of Americans didn't manage their savings optimally. They went to work, played by the rules, and saved what they could. We're here because the gains due to productivity growth for the last 40 years have increasingly gone to the to top wealth and income percentiles. That is the result of tax and trade policies changes that began in the 1970s and were cemented by the 1990s. Meanwhile, concurrent with those changes, the cost of things that used to be "basics", like health care, higher education, and housing, have skyrocketed, while previously "universal" rights like good public primary education have been turned into lotteries. Society's capital has been sold to the highest bidder, and most of us have had no choice but to be part of that auction. None of this is to excuse banks extracting revenue from savers via fees, or other similar practices pointed out in the article, but better management of personal financial capital won't be effective in helping people who can't cover an unexpected $400 expense, because those people have no financial capital to begin with, and due to tax policies designed to keep wealth in dynasties, their children likely won't have any capital either.
- bluGill 7y ago
  there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck. There are people working fast food who manage to save money. It is a spending problem. The things you list do not help either group, but the fact is most people spend every penny.
  - sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago
    I don't believe it's purely a spending issue when things like childcare, education, and healthcare are growing at 2x the inflation rate. We have basic infrastructure costs in America that are spirally out of control that are really eating into wages.
  - gapo 7y ago
    > there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck. Can you provide a source for that please ? Also, it would be interesting to find how much of their expenses are paying back their insanely high tuition-fees.
  - danans 7y ago
    > there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck. There are people working fast food who manage to save money. It is a spending problem. The existence of a statistically insignifcant number of counter-examples on either end does not negate the broader societal trend toward greater wealth/income disparity.
  - tmh79 7y ago
    > there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck This isn't true, at least in any sense of the word we would agree with. (Wife works in medicine, is a doctor at this level, we run in these circles). They are "living paycheck to paycheck" in the sense that they've set their stock brokerage to automagically deduct 10k usd/month from their bank account, and they pay 10k/month on a mortgage (which accumulate equity) and their checking account doesn't grow in size and their monthly float is the same. Some of them pay for private school which means they only save 3k/month instead of 10k/month, how oppressive. Their checking account "funny money they allow themselves to spend on anything" isn't growing and is the same, but their net worth is growing 15k/month.
solidasparagus 7y ago
I'm so disappointed. I thought this was going to be an article about how the money pouring into the self-driving industry/AI industry matters more than whether we actually get self-driving cars.
- uoaei 7y ago
  I was wondering when our cars would become our wallets. Guess I'll have to wait for the answer.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  I also thought the same, but I'm not disappointed. The article was much, much more interesting and really interested me.
wait_a_minute 7y ago
Uh...isn't an index fund that tracks the S&P 500 basically self-driving money? That with something like Mint is basically all you need to do well financially speaking. It feels like this blog post is massively overcomplicating the problem of personal finance. It really isn't rocket science. If anything, the basics are simple and boring and unsophisticated.
- na85 7y ago
  Don't forget the narrative being pushed by the owner class that taking on debt in the form of real estate mortgages and car loans is a sign of maturity and adulthood.
  - friedman23 7y ago
    First, real estate and car mortgages are completely different, nobody in their right mind would call a car an investment. I've never seen anyone suggest that taking out a loan to buy a car is a sign of maturity. Loans for real estate can make sense financially and real estate is one way for people to become rich fast.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Real estate is a bad way to become rich fast (unless your full time job is landlord and you understand how to make this business work). It is often (but not always) worth it anyway, but real estate should break even with inflation over time: not a great investment.
      - friedman23 7y ago
        > should break even with inflation over time: not a great investment This is not historically true and the reason why so many people become rich (and poor) with real estate is because of the amount of leverage it enables.
        bluGill 7y ago
haecceity 7y ago
Self driving money is just index funds?
sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago
For those looking for financial institutions that don't gouge you here are some recommendations: * Vanguard - They have been around since the 1970s and started the whole war on investment fees. Wealthfront tries to sell how advanced they are, but it's mostly a re-packaging of what Vanguard has been doing for decades. Customers are shareholders so you don't have misaligned incentives. They have tons of well managed low fee index funds. Vanguard works for most people * Ally Bank - they don't charge many fees, reimburse atm fees, and give competitive savings rates * Local credit unions - there are many local credit unions that have very fair policy and terms. I find it ironic that this article hypes all these vc driven startups who are largely have the same incentives as the existing greedy banks and ignores existing institutions that have fair governance models and have been delivering fair and affordable financial products for decades.
- whiddershins 7y ago
  S/gauge/gouge
- daxelrod 7y ago
  > Wealthfront tries to sell how advanced they are, but it's mostly a re-packaging of what Vanguard has been doing for decades. Can you elaborate on this? My understanding is that Vanguard provides a variety of passively managed funds, but does not give automated financial advice based on the specifics of clients' situations and needs. (Maybe you could consider target date funds the equivalent of this, but they're based on at most one dimension of client needs.) Wealthfront, on the other hand, provides passively managed portfolios with financial advice based upon questions they ask their clients. The portfolios may be equivalent to Vanguard's funds, but the value-add is the financial advice. Maybe you don't value that advice, but it doesn't seem fair to characterize this as simply a repackaging. (Note that this comparison will change once Vanguard launches its own roboadvisor, which was announced in October.)
  - sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago
    > Wealthfront, on the other hand, provides passively managed portfolios with financial advice based upon questions they ask their clients. The portfolios may be equivalent to Vanguard's funds, but the value-add is the financial advice. Maybe you don't value that advice, but it doesn't seem fair to characterize this as simply a repackaging. So I worked at a competitor of Wealthfront and while this is how a robo-advisor is marketed, this isn't actually what Wealthfront does. There is no real personalization of the product; you merely fill out a survey and it comes up with a risk score that adjusts your asset allocation. I know how those surveys work (because I built one) and it is laughably close to a Buzzfeed survey that guesses which game of thrones character you are closest to. The survey gets a measure of risk, which is really just one of a million inputs that you need to give proper financial advice. The truth is relevant financial advice requires inputs beyond a generic 15 question survey. You need to do a data dump of all your assets, your financial goals, and then you need a human (or robot) to do analysis to figure out the path forward. Wealthfront doesn't do that. It doesn't adjust my asset allocation in my wealthfront account because I already have existing funds in those areas in other brokerages. It doesn't tell me about the backdoor Roth IRA trick which will maximize my retirement savings. It doesn't analyze my 401k funds to tell me which funds make the most sense. It literally is a re-packaged target date fund that is customized based on one data point (client risk). For 99% of Americans it doesn't do any more than a target date fund or a mix of index funds do. Yes, I guess it works for the 1% of americans who's biggest financial issue is that their passive index funds don't exactly match their risk profile. I'm a personal finance junkie, and in the last year I've talked to a lot of people about their financial goals and challenges and I've yet to speak to one where the main solution to their problems was a robo advisor. It's just not a real use case. Here are real use cases I've encountered: * Figuring out how loan refinancing can reduce debt burdens long term * Figuring out how to contribute to their kids future education expenses * Figuring out the size of an emergency fund you need and where to put it (the answer is a high yield savings account) * Figuring out a reasonable living budget based on income and debt * Figuring out how to maximize tax burden through a combination of 401K, IRAs * Figure out how to get tax savings once you hit income limits on IRAs The point I'm trying to make is this "variable mix of index ETFs based on a 15 question survey" is not as much of a gamechanger as the roboadvisor's tout. It's a very limited product that is actually quite easy to build, and doesn't really help most of Americans (but it sounds cool). For me the sharedholder structure of a credit union and Vanguard is way more revolutionary than the current Wealthfront product.
exabrial 7y ago
Is this an advertisement? A lot of cool facts in here but it names one specific company as the solution
- venturegrit 7y ago
  No. I am not an investor in Wealthfront, Digit or Tally and have no relationship with these companies.
middlechild9 7y ago
This is an ad for Wealthfront. They are trying to coin the term "self-driving money". Their CEO has been talking it up a bunch in podcasts and articles.
- venturegrit 7y ago
  This is not an ad for Wealthfront. I am not an investor in Wealthfront, Digit or Tally and have no relationship with these companies.
  - krustyburger 7y ago
    As South Park pointed out, some ads don’t even know they’re ads.
slg 7y ago
Count me as skeptical when it comes to all these robo-advisors. The primary issue is the principal-agent problem [1]. You need to align the incentives of the financial advisor with the incentives of the client. There are a few ways to do that. One example is the fiduciary duty mentioned in the article that makes it a legal responsibility to act in the best interests of the client. Another option is to allow the customer to share in the profits of the advisor through some type of customer ownership like you see with companies like Vanguard or with credit unions. VC funded robo-advisors like Wealthfront have no solution to this problem. In order for them to be trusted with full control of your money, they would have to be satisfied with growing their profit simply by increased customer base and not want to increase profit per customer. Publicly owned or privately owned VC backed companies simply don't work like that. There is a constant need to continually increase profits. It is just a matter of time until someone at robo-advisors says "we can make more money if we add this fee". And since they control all your finances already and you are apparently the type of person who doesn't want to think about or look at your finances, odds are you probably won't even notice the new fee. That is a recipe for obvious abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
- daxelrod 7y ago
  > In order for them to be trusted with full control of your money, they would have to be satisfied with growing their profit simply by increased customer base and not want to increase profit per customer. > It is just a matter of time until someone at robo-advisors says "we can make more money if we add this fee". There are a number of options beyond fees that keep incentives aligned between advisor and client. For example: 1. The advisor grows the client's assets by investing them well (because the advisor's revenue is a portion of assets under management). 2. The advisor encourages the client to invest more. This could either be moving more of their portfolio to the advisor, or encouraging regular deposits (which is a valid investing strategy.)
  - slg 7y ago
    Option 1 doesn't do a good job of aligning incentives because you are taking a small percentage of a small percentage. The article says Wealthfront charges 0.25%. Let's use 5% as the difference between a good and bad investment (this is an arbitrary but I believe realistic number). This means the difference between Wealthfront doing a good job and a bad job for the customer is the equivalent of them increasing their fee 0.0125%. That is a $1.25 increase per $10,000 invested. So what is the better bath to increase profits, doing a fantastic job of investing, which likely comes with increased expenses, or increase your fee some tiny percentage that will almost surely go unnoticed by the customer? Option 2 is moot for the authors example since they suggest these companies manage everything and therefore a customer can't give the advisor more to manage.
saviorand 7y ago
So basically... let an algorithm make financial decisions for yourself and all problems are solved?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JohnFen 7y ago
> spend no time in school—or anywhere else—teaching them what money is, how it works, and what the rules of the game are. Things have sure changed from when I was in school. I remember that a significant amount of time was spent on this.
gwbas1c 7y ago
Maybe we could start with some simpler services? Context: I very rarely set up autopay because the cost of a mistake is high. I wish I had a bank that showed my money in a cashflow view: Money coming in per day / week / month / year, cost of bills and services per day / week / month / year, and some semi-smart automation to autopay my loans, save, and invest. What do I mean by semi-smart? For loans, know the interest rate, date due, length, ect, and calculate when it's better to invest versus pay off early. For example, if, when adding a loan to billpay, I could add some of this additional information, it would be much easier than just adding autopay.

90 points by venturegrit 7y ago

This looks a lot like an advertisement. It's got over two screensful of "self-driving money is", like it's trying to drum a slogan into the mind of the reader.

jsinai 7y ago

> Here again we have misaligned incentives. Banks optimize revenue when customers have as much debt as possible. > While expensive to develop, the beauty of software is it can be infinitely replicated. And at scale, the marginal cost of one additional user approaches zero. So if I understand the article correctly, companies like Wealthfront can make money by signing up more users. Their technology scales so that marginal costs become zero and they earn an income from fees, so marginal profit also scales. But in the long term is this enough? Surely their also needs to be an alignment along the lines of savings: if users save more and if banks can benefit from this, then everyone would be doing it.

Unsimplified 7y ago

In a 2 person economy, if person A stops cycling money back (thru trade not debt), person B suffers. Something similar happens in a 300M person economy, so I agree, self driving money would be a great solution.

danans 7y ago

> 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and most Americans would struggle to cover an unexpected $400 expense. > How did we get here? > Why aren’t we doing better? > Managing Money is Hard We aren't here because millions of Americans didn't manage their savings optimally. They went to work, played by the rules, and saved what they could. We're here because the gains due to productivity growth for the last 40 years have increasingly gone to the to top wealth and income percentiles. That is the result of tax and trade policies changes that began in the 1970s and were cemented by the 1990s. Meanwhile, concurrent with those changes, the cost of things that used to be "basics", like health care, higher education, and housing, have skyrocketed, while previously "universal" rights like good public primary education have been turned into lotteries. Society's capital has been sold to the highest bidder, and most of us have had no choice but to be part of that auction. None of this is to excuse banks extracting revenue from savers via fees, or other similar practices pointed out in the article, but better management of personal financial capital won't be effective in helping people who can't cover an unexpected $400 expense, because those people have no financial capital to begin with, and due to tax policies designed to keep wealth in dynasties, their children likely won't have any capital either.

bluGill 7y ago
there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck. There are people working fast food who manage to save money. It is a spending problem. The things you list do not help either group, but the fact is most people spend every penny.
- sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago
  I don't believe it's purely a spending issue when things like childcare, education, and healthcare are growing at 2x the inflation rate. We have basic infrastructure costs in America that are spirally out of control that are really eating into wages.
- gapo 7y ago
  > there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck. Can you provide a source for that please ? Also, it would be interesting to find how much of their expenses are paying back their insanely high tuition-fees.
- danans 7y ago
  > there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck. There are people working fast food who manage to save money. It is a spending problem. The existence of a statistically insignifcant number of counter-examples on either end does not negate the broader societal trend toward greater wealth/income disparity.
- tmh79 7y ago
  > there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck This isn't true, at least in any sense of the word we would agree with. (Wife works in medicine, is a doctor at this level, we run in these circles). They are "living paycheck to paycheck" in the sense that they've set their stock brokerage to automagically deduct 10k usd/month from their bank account, and they pay 10k/month on a mortgage (which accumulate equity) and their checking account doesn't grow in size and their monthly float is the same. Some of them pay for private school which means they only save 3k/month instead of 10k/month, how oppressive. Their checking account "funny money they allow themselves to spend on anything" isn't growing and is the same, but their net worth is growing 15k/month.

solidasparagus 7y ago

I'm so disappointed. I thought this was going to be an article about how the money pouring into the self-driving industry/AI industry matters more than whether we actually get self-driving cars.

uoaei 7y ago
I was wondering when our cars would become our wallets. Guess I'll have to wait for the answer.
gwbas1c 7y ago
I also thought the same, but I'm not disappointed. The article was much, much more interesting and really interested me.

wait_a_minute 7y ago

Uh...isn't an index fund that tracks the S&P 500 basically self-driving money? That with something like Mint is basically all you need to do well financially speaking. It feels like this blog post is massively overcomplicating the problem of personal finance. It really isn't rocket science. If anything, the basics are simple and boring and unsophisticated.

na85 7y ago
Don't forget the narrative being pushed by the owner class that taking on debt in the form of real estate mortgages and car loans is a sign of maturity and adulthood.
- friedman23 7y ago
  First, real estate and car mortgages are completely different, nobody in their right mind would call a car an investment. I've never seen anyone suggest that taking out a loan to buy a car is a sign of maturity. Loans for real estate can make sense financially and real estate is one way for people to become rich fast.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Real estate is a bad way to become rich fast (unless your full time job is landlord and you understand how to make this business work). It is often (but not always) worth it anyway, but real estate should break even with inflation over time: not a great investment.
    - friedman23 7y ago
      > should break even with inflation over time: not a great investment This is not historically true and the reason why so many people become rich (and poor) with real estate is because of the amount of leverage it enables.
      - bluGill 7y ago

haecceity 7y ago

Self driving money is just index funds?

sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago

For those looking for financial institutions that don't gouge you here are some recommendations: * Vanguard - They have been around since the 1970s and started the whole war on investment fees. Wealthfront tries to sell how advanced they are, but it's mostly a re-packaging of what Vanguard has been doing for decades. Customers are shareholders so you don't have misaligned incentives. They have tons of well managed low fee index funds. Vanguard works for most people * Ally Bank - they don't charge many fees, reimburse atm fees, and give competitive savings rates * Local credit unions - there are many local credit unions that have very fair policy and terms. I find it ironic that this article hypes all these vc driven startups who are largely have the same incentives as the existing greedy banks and ignores existing institutions that have fair governance models and have been delivering fair and affordable financial products for decades.

whiddershins 7y ago
S/gauge/gouge
daxelrod 7y ago
> Wealthfront tries to sell how advanced they are, but it's mostly a re-packaging of what Vanguard has been doing for decades. Can you elaborate on this? My understanding is that Vanguard provides a variety of passively managed funds, but does not give automated financial advice based on the specifics of clients' situations and needs. (Maybe you could consider target date funds the equivalent of this, but they're based on at most one dimension of client needs.) Wealthfront, on the other hand, provides passively managed portfolios with financial advice based upon questions they ask their clients. The portfolios may be equivalent to Vanguard's funds, but the value-add is the financial advice. Maybe you don't value that advice, but it doesn't seem fair to characterize this as simply a repackaging. (Note that this comparison will change once Vanguard launches its own roboadvisor, which was announced in October.)
- sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago
  > Wealthfront, on the other hand, provides passively managed portfolios with financial advice based upon questions they ask their clients. The portfolios may be equivalent to Vanguard's funds, but the value-add is the financial advice. Maybe you don't value that advice, but it doesn't seem fair to characterize this as simply a repackaging. So I worked at a competitor of Wealthfront and while this is how a robo-advisor is marketed, this isn't actually what Wealthfront does. There is no real personalization of the product; you merely fill out a survey and it comes up with a risk score that adjusts your asset allocation. I know how those surveys work (because I built one) and it is laughably close to a Buzzfeed survey that guesses which game of thrones character you are closest to. The survey gets a measure of risk, which is really just one of a million inputs that you need to give proper financial advice. The truth is relevant financial advice requires inputs beyond a generic 15 question survey. You need to do a data dump of all your assets, your financial goals, and then you need a human (or robot) to do analysis to figure out the path forward. Wealthfront doesn't do that. It doesn't adjust my asset allocation in my wealthfront account because I already have existing funds in those areas in other brokerages. It doesn't tell me about the backdoor Roth IRA trick which will maximize my retirement savings. It doesn't analyze my 401k funds to tell me which funds make the most sense. It literally is a re-packaged target date fund that is customized based on one data point (client risk). For 99% of Americans it doesn't do any more than a target date fund or a mix of index funds do. Yes, I guess it works for the 1% of americans who's biggest financial issue is that their passive index funds don't exactly match their risk profile. I'm a personal finance junkie, and in the last year I've talked to a lot of people about their financial goals and challenges and I've yet to speak to one where the main solution to their problems was a robo advisor. It's just not a real use case. Here are real use cases I've encountered: * Figuring out how loan refinancing can reduce debt burdens long term * Figuring out how to contribute to their kids future education expenses * Figuring out the size of an emergency fund you need and where to put it (the answer is a high yield savings account) * Figuring out a reasonable living budget based on income and debt * Figuring out how to maximize tax burden through a combination of 401K, IRAs * Figure out how to get tax savings once you hit income limits on IRAs The point I'm trying to make is this "variable mix of index ETFs based on a 15 question survey" is not as much of a gamechanger as the roboadvisor's tout. It's a very limited product that is actually quite easy to build, and doesn't really help most of Americans (but it sounds cool). For me the sharedholder structure of a credit union and Vanguard is way more revolutionary than the current Wealthfront product.

exabrial 7y ago

Is this an advertisement? A lot of cool facts in here but it names one specific company as the solution

venturegrit 7y ago
No. I am not an investor in Wealthfront, Digit or Tally and have no relationship with these companies.

middlechild9 7y ago

This is an ad for Wealthfront. They are trying to coin the term "self-driving money". Their CEO has been talking it up a bunch in podcasts and articles.

venturegrit 7y ago
This is not an ad for Wealthfront. I am not an investor in Wealthfront, Digit or Tally and have no relationship with these companies.
- krustyburger 7y ago
  As South Park pointed out, some ads don’t even know they’re ads.

slg 7y ago

Count me as skeptical when it comes to all these robo-advisors. The primary issue is the principal-agent problem [1]. You need to align the incentives of the financial advisor with the incentives of the client. There are a few ways to do that. One example is the fiduciary duty mentioned in the article that makes it a legal responsibility to act in the best interests of the client. Another option is to allow the customer to share in the profits of the advisor through some type of customer ownership like you see with companies like Vanguard or with credit unions. VC funded robo-advisors like Wealthfront have no solution to this problem. In order for them to be trusted with full control of your money, they would have to be satisfied with growing their profit simply by increased customer base and not want to increase profit per customer. Publicly owned or privately owned VC backed companies simply don't work like that. There is a constant need to continually increase profits. It is just a matter of time until someone at robo-advisors says "we can make more money if we add this fee". And since they control all your finances already and you are apparently the type of person who doesn't want to think about or look at your finances, odds are you probably won't even notice the new fee. That is a recipe for obvious abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

daxelrod 7y ago
> In order for them to be trusted with full control of your money, they would have to be satisfied with growing their profit simply by increased customer base and not want to increase profit per customer. > It is just a matter of time until someone at robo-advisors says "we can make more money if we add this fee". There are a number of options beyond fees that keep incentives aligned between advisor and client. For example: 1. The advisor grows the client's assets by investing them well (because the advisor's revenue is a portion of assets under management). 2. The advisor encourages the client to invest more. This could either be moving more of their portfolio to the advisor, or encouraging regular deposits (which is a valid investing strategy.)
- slg 7y ago
  Option 1 doesn't do a good job of aligning incentives because you are taking a small percentage of a small percentage. The article says Wealthfront charges 0.25%. Let's use 5% as the difference between a good and bad investment (this is an arbitrary but I believe realistic number). This means the difference between Wealthfront doing a good job and a bad job for the customer is the equivalent of them increasing their fee 0.0125%. That is a $1.25 increase per $10,000 invested. So what is the better bath to increase profits, doing a fantastic job of investing, which likely comes with increased expenses, or increase your fee some tiny percentage that will almost surely go unnoticed by the customer? Option 2 is moot for the authors example since they suggest these companies manage everything and therefore a customer can't give the advisor more to manage.

saviorand 7y ago

So basically... let an algorithm make financial decisions for yourself and all problems are solved?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

JohnFen 7y ago

> spend no time in school—or anywhere else—teaching them what money is, how it works, and what the rules of the game are. Things have sure changed from when I was in school. I remember that a significant amount of time was spent on this.

gwbas1c 7y ago

Maybe we could start with some simpler services? Context: I very rarely set up autopay because the cost of a mistake is high. I wish I had a bank that showed my money in a cashflow view: Money coming in per day / week / month / year, cost of bills and services per day / week / month / year, and some semi-smart automation to autopay my loans, save, and invest. What do I mean by semi-smart? For loans, know the interest rate, date due, length, ect, and calculate when it's better to invest versus pay off early. For example, if, when adding a loan to billpay, I could add some of this additional information, it would be much easier than just adding autopay.