Trust my bank login details to a third party?

-


The UK has open-banking legislation which allows regulated companies to ask you for authorisation to login to your bank accounts. They can then offer you services like analysing your spending to recommend ways to save money.

Note that these sites are regulated but you should not take my word for it. Please get their registration details and input them at the UK FCA site to confirm for yourself they are still currently legal to conduct this type of business in the UK.

Snoop

You'd think the name would put some people off. Snoop does what it says. Has a look into your every transaction, summarising them by what it knows about the payments and, for example, suggests an energy provider with a better deal.

I like the fact that Snoop summarises spending, in away the normal bank statement just does not help with.

However Snoop also displays things like how much I spent with a particular ISP since Spring 2019. I'm not sure what the relevance of those multi-year summaries are, except to say, "yes, that's a bit number" tempting the user into switching provider. Switching providers is how Snoop makes money of course.

None of Snoop's deals are of significant benefit to me. We have an offset mortgage, which is far and away the best deal around, I don't want to change energy provider for non-financial reasons.

CoGo

Now this one's a bit more interesting to me.

In my opinion, the world faces a bigger crisis than anything Covid-19 has thrown at us. It's almost certain to strike severely within the lifetime of people alive today.

CoGo analyses your spending to tell you about your carbon footprint. I guess they make their living on a commission off the offset they recommend to compensation for your lifestyle.

Whether this will work in the long term - there are only so many trees you can plant in developing countries etc - remains to be seen, but there seems to be no obligation to buy the offset and if enough people used the app. and acted on its advice to change their behaviour and reduce carbon impact, CoGo could help towards the 2030 and 2050 climate goals.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Instead of pushing the country over a cliff?

-
OK, this is pretty out-there, but I have to say it, sorry! Invoking Article 50 is not the brave thing to do. A truly brave leader might stand up and say: "Mistakes have been made. Referendums are great tools of direct democracy, but most countries have a written, considered constitution and do not base decisions that will affect the future of everyone alive today for the rest of their lives on the electoral flip of a coin as my predecessor did. Lies have been told, on both sides, but there is even evidence that another country was involved in engineering the result. A country whose leader believes that a weakened Europe and UK is in his best interests. This is very difficult, but I have decided that on balance I cannot proceed with the Article 50 declaration. I will instead schedule the dissolution of Parliament for a general election and a further referendum on the European question. The voters of the UK must have a further say on whether they wish to go ahead with such a momento...
Read more

Scotrail "smart" cards?

-
Image
A few years after London made its Oyster smart card unnecessary by integrating contactless bank cards for Tube and bus journeys, Scotrail has finally enabled Flexipasses on their own proprietary smart cards. My home station is a ticketless station. I feel there are a couple of aspects of the scheme for smartcards that have not been user-tested from the point of view of users of small rural commuter stations. Of which there are many on the Glasgow-Edinburgh lines and many more throughout Scotland. I'd like to always arrive with plenty of time for my train in the morning, but sometimes the train is even early. At Kirknewton, Scotrail have placed the Edinburgh-bound smartcard reader by the main car-park entrance, halfway along the platform, about 50m from the entrance nearest the road where late arriving passengers - some detained by the level crossing - scramble for the train. Maybe Scotrail's business analysts imagine that everyone always arrives for a train with 90 second...
Read more

So wind is the answer?

-
UK generation Look at any day, week or month. See the red line? That's gas turbines.  Burning gas is better than coal for soot, but carbon is carbon. Methane plus oxygen generates heat plus carbon dioxide. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-natural-gas The blue line, that's wind. There's about 14GW of total capacity in the UK at the moment. That's about half the UK's average demand.  https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ Except on Tuesday, when it was almost zero. So it is on any hour, day, week or month you look at.  Electricity demand varies a bit, but the red line is almost a mirror image of the blue. That's because electricity can't be stored in any great quantity. The pumped storage and batteries on the grid at the moment are used only for smoothing, not covering major gaps in the wind.  Every time the wind turbines stop, the gas turbines start In a BBC News report yesterday, the 9th of June 2020, a screen showed a picture of coal gen...
Read more