Build a custom PFM experience – and fast – with Tink’s SDKs

6 min read|Published March 26, 2020

In digital banking, personal finance management (PFM) is a key contributor to customer engagement. If you can be the go-to place for customers to manage their finances, that can easily turn into increased loyalty – and sales. With Tink’s PFM SDKs, making PFM happen doesn’t need to be a massive undertaking. You can get up in running in a few hours, saving developer time and getting to market quicker.

Personal financial management applications help users understand and manage their finances. Many banks and financial institutions offer some kind of PFM services today, ranging from basic charts and transaction lists, to smart statistics, budgeting and savings tools – or even actionable insights that can give users personalised advice.

Customers today want and expect PFM, but building a unique, competitive PFM product from scratch can take a long time – and expensive developer resources. What our SDK does is give you all the necessary tech components so you can jump straight to the fun part: deciding what your PFM experience will be like.

Packaging PFM experience into SDKs

After a few runs of creating bespoke UX and interfaces for PFM apps – first in Sweden, and then for larger and larger customers across Europe – we learned a lot. The demand for our expertise was high, but we couldn’t take on every PFM-developing project that came our way. What we could do was make it easier for everyone to build their own PFM applications based on our tech.

So we took what we learned and packaged it into neat little kits. Software development kits (SDKs), to be precise. That means any customer can now tap into eight years of PFM experience with three lines of code – and save months of development effort.

Staying true to your brand – while still using Tink’s PFM

For those of us who’ve seen a fair share of PFM applications, it’s usually easy to identify an off-the-shelf solution. They do the job, and they’re definitely practical. But the risk of having a PFM implementation that doesn’t have the look and feel of your brand is that it can create a disconnect for your customers – or even put them off.

That’s why customisation is important. With our SDKs, you can adjust all the colours and fonts to match your own brand design. That way, customers will get a consistent experience, and associate the value they get from PFM with your business and your brand.

What can PFM SDKs help me with?

There are three main benefits of using PFM SDKs. Let’s break them down.

Quickest time to market

In a competitive market, time is of the essence. If you take too long to release a new product or service, a competitor might beat you to it – and snatch up the customer base before you get the chance.

While some larger PFM projects can take well over a year to design, develop – then deploy, test, and iterate – our SDKs can be implemented, customised, and released in a few hours.

Less time also translates to less money spent in developer hours, and more opportunity for your developers to focus on other things.

Ease of integration

Whether or not you have an existing solution, SDKs can help you get your PFM out to market quicker.

If you want to build an entirely new app, you can get started with a ready made, feature-rich PFM experience with as little as 3 lines of code. Choose which features to add, how you want to place within the app, and customise the colours and fonts to match your brand. And that’s it, you’re ready to go live.

If you already have an existing app, you can add powerful new PFM features to it with as little as 1 line of code, customising the look so it matches your app’s. All with flexible integration points, so it fits right in with your existing structure and navigation.

PFM – POC

If you’re still on the fence about PFM and whether it really resonates with your use case, SDKs are a great way to try PFM as proof-of-concept. With minimal investment and time to market, you can have a solid PFM offering in your customers’ hands in a matter of days.

OK, but why use PFM at all?

For close to a decade now, our PFM team has been putting a lot of energy towards building a PFM product with data-driven design and a sharp focus on end-users. We’ve thoroughly tested all of our PFM features before releasing them as SDKs, and we’ve found that they can positively impact both engagement and revenue.

Drive engagement

PFM is one of the best tools financial institutions have to engage customers. By being the place users go to manage their money, you become indispensable to them.

Not only do you increase the amount of time that users spend in your app, but you increase retention too. When customers keep coming back to your service to manage their finances, check budgets, or track their savings goals, your relationship deepens – leading to more customer loyalty.

Increase sales

Once you have customer engagement (and loyalty), you can further this relationship and increase sales by sending them relevant, personalised offers. This is possible because by providing PFM, you can get a better understanding of customers’ preferences, current expenses, financial situation or even goals.

When you have these insights, you can increase the chance of conversion – all while helping your customers achieve their goals.

What’s coming next?

Our most popular PFM features are already live and available, but we’re not done yet. We’ll keep building new features as technology and trends move, and they will be available to you with future updates.

Interested in PFM SDKs? Get in touch.

CategoryProduct

More in Product

2024-07-17

2 min read

Banking on engagement

This Tink white paper introduces new consumer and retail banking executive research from key European markets, setting the scene for banks to take the next step with Personal Finance Management (PFM).

This image depicts a tablescape from above with a slice of cake, fork, drinking glass and mobile phone, with the phone screen displaying Tink's Variable Spend feature in action.

2024-05-30

5 min read

Meet Variable Spend: our latest feature for intelligent expense tracking

Expense tracking can be detailed as well as intuitive – say hello to Variable Spend, a new feature of Tink Data Enrichment designed to help banks offer their customers more insight.

This image depicts an abstract illustration to convey the concept of a categorisation model that extracts value from account and transactional data, with the aim of resulting in a cleaned data set.

2024-05-28

12 min read

Risk decisioning essentials: our latest categorisation model updates to help you get ahead

Confident decisions, top quality reports and going to market faster are just some of the benefits Tink’s new categorisation model has for lenders – deep dive into the world of generative AI, multilingual models, and more with this guide.