Listen to this: Bankjoy, the Y Combinator alum startup, is hotly working on a banking app for Apple Watch that will rely on voice for functionality.
Dick Tracy would be thrilled.
Michael Duncan, the founder and CEO of Bankjoy, told us yesterday that the Apple Watch app will be done “in a couple of months.”
“We want to make voice the interface,” Duncan said.
Duncan described a voice interface that was beyond a simple “What is my balance?” Bankjoy wants its Apple Watch app to answer questions like, How much money did I spend last month? or How much have I spent on pizza this year? In other words, Bankjoy will facilitate data analysis via Apple Watch voice commands by incorporating natural language processing. Duncan said Bankjoy is working with researchers at the University of Michigan on the voice app. (Bankjoy moved to Michigan from Silicon Valley after finishing its three-month stint in the Y Combinator incubator last March.)
The app will be part of a full suite of banking apps Bankjoy is (ambitiously) developing. Essentially, Bankjoy wants to take Standard Treasury’s API strategy to the next level, by not just building the APIs, but offering UX skins on top of them. The company is building “connector layers” to most core banking systems, some of which are, as readers of this blog know, in ancient Cobol hieroglyphics, er, code. So far, Bankjoy has built a connector to Jack Henry & Associates’s Symitar core for an unnamed Michigan credit union.
“An API should work no matter what the core,” Duncan said. Bankjoy’s wants to create the connector layers so developers “don’t have to care about the core.”
Duncan said Bankjoy has gotten to the point where it knows how to overcome the hurdles presented by disparate and, in some cases, archaic core banking systems.
“Whatever the core is, the connector layer gets swapped,” he said. “We do the dirty work. You really only need around 10 connector layers. There just aren’t that many variations of systems.”
The product “skins,” meanwhile, will help Bankjoy “gain traction.” Bank Innovation demoed Bankjoy’s mobile banking app, and it has some cool features. For example, its search function — often overlooked — is lightening fast, and can parse efficiently between disparate search requests (think “9/1/15 transactions” vs. “September 1 2015 transactions”). It also offers a simple “shut off my credit card” function that looks easy, but obviously crosses through multiple core banking system modules — and does so with great speed. That said, the app is a step forward, not a leap forward.
Which is why we are eagerly anticipating Bankjoy’s Apple Watch app. It “sounds” revolutionary.