Are there privacy concerns I should be worried about before validating this new idea?
Hi IH 👋
You ever have one of those ideas that you think is great, then after a few days you think it's useless or too hard to implement, only for that idea to come back to you again and again for years to come?
A few years ago I had an idea for an app similar to Mint (by Intuit) or Copilot, but instead of opening an mobile/web app, it sends you a daily email with the information you are interested in. For example, I log into each of my financial accounts every day just to check on balances - it's not really necessary, but it gives me a small dopamine hit as if I was opening Instagram or Twitter.
It's a pain to open each app individually, but at the same time, most budgeting applications take too long to load and are pretty cumbersome in terms of their UI. I want something lightweight, that has the following:
- A daily email in my inbox that shows me each of my account balances across all of my financial institutions
- A "recurring charge is coming and your checking account balance is low" warning, that looks at the balance of the account that a recurring charge will be withdrawn from, and lets me know if I need to transfer more money to it.
I want to start validating the idea, and have even gotten started on a small prototype; however I can't help but think the biggest roadblock on this journey is going to be privacy.
When Chase Bank sends me a monthly statement summary, they don't show any sensitive financial information in that email. I assume this is because they don't want to spread their risk across more than just their own web/mobile apps in case someone's email account was compromised.
Is it a bad idea to be sending sensitive financial information in plain text straight to peoples' email inboxes? If you used this app, and something bad happened (someone saw some information they weren't supposed to), would you be mad at the app, or your own lapse of judgement?
My goal with this app is to make peoples' financial lives a little bit easier... but could it be that I'm creating new opportunities to make their lives harder?
Interested in hearing if anyone else has battled a similar situation, and what they did? 🙂
