The combination of two seemingly incongruous words – finance and technology that make up “fintech” often confuses people. While fintech has many dimensions, in a nutshell, it can be summed up as the use of modern technology for the development of financial tools for both individuals and businesses. The adoption of fintech tools can make the management of finances efficient, more convenient, and rewarding than before, which makes it essential for those who are looking to improving their finances. A brief look at the various fintech tools available for managing personal finance and their benefits:
What Is Possible with Fintech
If you can imagine any money management task, you can be sure that there will be a fintech tool for it that you can use on a smartphone or any other device connected to the internet. Some of the most common applications of fintech include opening, accessing, and managing all your different financial accounts, checking balances, and carrying out transactions, paying bills, setting financial goals, creating and updating a budget, monitoring and analyzing spends. You can also use fintech tools for analyzing the various savings and investment options, planning for retirement, checking the status of your tax refunds and credit reports as well as setting reminders and alerts for specified events and due dates of bills. For the averagely tech-savvy person, learning how to use the fintech tools is not an issue as they are built to be operated in an intuitive way. According to https://www.mint.com, fintech makes your life far easier.
Benefits of Using Fintech
Convenience: To many people, the concept of fintech may seem scary, but if you care to think about it, you may actually be already using it in some way or the other. Generally, most people are already accustomed to checking their bank balances or to pay bills online and the principal reason why they prefer to do so is because of sheer convenience. By using fintech, you no longer have to line up at the bank counter to get your passbook updated and know your account balance or have to write out a check and mail it with enough time to spare for a bill payment that you need to make.
Accessibility: Fintech tools typically operate on smartphones or any other internet connected device so the services are available round-the-clock. This can be extremely handy in your management of time, as you are no longer bound by the business hours of the bank or the financial intermediary to access any of the details that you may need. Continuous accessibility of financial information can be extremely empowering when you are either rushed for time or residing in an area that is underserved.
Savings: Fintech tools can save you a lot of money in non-sufficient funds fees or credit card late payment fees as you can set the fintech tool that you are using to alert you when your account has a low balance or when you need to make a credit card payment. Additionally, money transfers can usually be done for free or a very nominal amount through fintech apps. Moreover, by using these apps you can save yourself the trouble and the expense of going to the branch of the bank to deposit checks or to carry out other transactions.
Education: Many fintech apps make available a host of features for financial planning and investment. Apart from practical tips on financial planning, you can read up on various articles and blogs on sound financial management and improving your credit score as well as debt settlement reviews. The apps will also let you perform various comparative studies across financial products so that you know which one works the best for you.
Automation: You can schedule many of the financial transactions on the app so that you can just forget about it and save yourself the worry of having to remember the due dates of various bills. The payments are made on time so that you do not ever miss a payment that can pull down your credit score or incur the steep penalties that card companies usually charge.
Efficiency: One of the biggest reasons for using fintech apps is to increase efficiency of work and save valuable time. The apps have the capability of automatically pulling the required information from the various accounts that you may be using, analyzing the data, performing calculations, and generating reports almost instantaneously on demand. Done manually the old-fashioned way, it would have taken you hours of painstaking effort and no assurance that you would not have made mistakes.
Accountability: The use of fintech apps makes it very easy instead to first make a budget that takes into account your total income and sets off the earmarked expenses against it thereby letting you know what sort of surplus or deficit you are likely to face. Further, the app tracks spending far more conveniently as it has full access to your bank account as well as credit cards and can alert you if you are overspending on any account so that you can immediately cut back and get back on track.
Motivation: The use of fintech apps lets you have your complete financial picture as and when you like. You can set various goals like savings, investments, debt repayment, etc. and let the app handle it for you. You can track the progress you are making on any specific objective and this serves to keep you motivated to accomplish it at the fastest. Some apps even give you financial rewards or incentives for you to achieve certain things so you are automatically encouraged to try your best.
Conclusion:
There is a huge choice of fintech apps and as a user with certain objectives in mind; you should take care to choose the apps that let you achieve your goals on the most convenient manner. List out the features that you want to ensure that your selected app has those functions and is also compatible with your smartphone or any other device you want to use. Also, figure out whether a free app would suffice or you want the extended set of features that come with paid apps.