Quick summary

• PFM 2.0 is shifting from financial advice to financial action.

• AIML can analyse financial behaviours and patterns to help automate financial management.

• Finch Bills Analyser is an out-of-the-box AIML tool to identify and predict recurring bills.

Finch’s powerful Bills Analyser is now available to any financial institution looking to innovate the next generation of Personal Financial Management.

While the PFM (Personal Financial Management) app has been around for over a decade, the first iteration of PFMs is very different from the AIML powered financial management features available with today’s technology. 

PFM 1.0 was all about account aggregation and providing a clearer, more comprehensive view of a customer’s spending across accounts. It provided basic budgeting, saving and spending insights to tell customers where their money was going. 

Since then, the value of the PFM has shifted from telling a customer what is happening in their financial lives to doing it for them. Advances in AIML and analytics have enabled the PFM to deliver on its on its financial management promise through what we call ‘autonomous finance’. 

Simply put, autonomous finance is the use of AI, Machine Learning and automation algorithms to execute financial decisions without input from the consumer. It analyses a customer’s transaction history to determine financial behaviours and patterns that can be handled through automation.

Bills, bills, bills

One of the core ingredients of a newly supercharged PFM 2.0 is the ability to accurately identify, predict and handle bills. Aside from automating bill payments, bill detection can provide an accurate view of a customer’s non-discretionary expenses and overall financial standing; valuable insight that can be used to support other PFM features such as payments, lending, investing or insurance. 

Developed in response to increasing interest in bill payments from PFM clients, the Finch Bills Analyser leverages our market-leading categorisation engine and ML algorithms to accurately detect and predict bills from over 25,000 billers in our database.

For new and existing customers, it analyses a customer’s transaction history, reviewing bill information such as merchant identity, transaction amount and frequency, to understand patterns in bill payment behaviour and calculate the likelihood of an upcoming bill. 

For PFMs, it can detect and analyse:

• Customer bill activity by Biller Name, amount, frequency and date
• How much their bills are going to cost every month 
• Historical bill analysis to predict the amount and frequency of upcoming bills

Data accuracy is key

While the race to bill automation has begun, accurate prediction of bills requires both access to historical data and the ability to analyse this data at scale. Training your own machine learning models for in-house analytics is feasible only with the support of a team of data scientists, access to a large training data set, and commitment to building the tools and processes for modern data processing and modelling.

Since 2019, the Finch platform has processed and enriched over 4 billion+ transactions, building continuous intelligence to power out-of-the-box analytics for our valued clients.

Interested in seeing our Bill Analyser in action? Contact us to schedule a demo today.