New FNB app feature set to bring timeline love to your expenses

This is interesting. Those notification SMSes you get when from your bank whenever money leaves or enters your account could soon be a thing of the past.

South African banking giant FNB says that it’s looking at converting the notifications into push messages that will appear on its smartphone and tablet app. The move could potentially save the bank millions of Rand a year in SMS fees.

At this point however, there are no promises that the new service will translate into a saving for FNB customers. That’s not too surprising though as it would depend how widely the service is adopted.

“Sending inContact as an instant message could potentially have cost savings and efficiency benefits for the bank,” FNB says.

The push messages would appear as a timeline on the user’s app. That actually makes a hell of a lot sense. Think about it? Would you rather have to scroll through your SMSes to figure out how you’ve spent your money, or view them all in one place?

Since launching the app in 2011, FNB has added a series of new features including geo-payments and instant messaging.

Competing bank Nedbank already sends a push message to its clients’ phones when they make payments online. It’s app is however, still in staff testing, so it’s unclear whether or not the finished product will have the same timeline functionality.