Before the end of the year, we’re aiming to put Lucie Money in the hands of a small group of first testers, using their own bank accounts.
So most of the last couple of months has gone into the parts of Lucie people meet first: the welcome screens, signing up, connecting a bank and then managing those connections. And alongside that, a lot of work on how Lucie reads transactions.
Bank connections
Bank connections can now be managed just by asking. Our first testers will be able to ask Lucie when a connection runs out, or to add or remove an account, and it will give them the details and the options right there in the conversation. When a connection has a month left, Lucie will tell them and offer to extend it.
Signing up and signing in
We’ve also designed how users sign up and sign in on their phones, and it’s being built now. Once the testers are in, Face ID, their fingerprint or a four-digit PIN will open Lucie again, and Lucie will, of course, stay locked even to someone who knows their phone’s passcode.
Making sense of transactions
Everything Lucie tells a user about their money depends on reading their transactions correctly, so this has been the other big piece of work.
The first version of categorisation is done, so Lucie can sort transactions into categories. And money a user moves between their own accounts is now recognised, so Lucie leaves it out of spending and income totals.
Lucie can also now answer questions that need detailed calculations. If a user asks for spending month by month, or by category, Lucie lays the figures out in a table.
The harder part, which we’re immersed in, is correct transaction identification. When you ask what you spent on groceries last month, adding it up is the easy bit; picking out exactly the right transactions is not. (I wrote about why that’s so hard a couple of weeks ago.) We’re working through it rule by rule. It’s meticulous and detailed work and, to be honest, it will go on for a long while yet. Our first testers will help here, by showing us some of the places where Lucie picks the wrong ones.
What’s next
Next is finishing the work to get the app ready for testers, then putting Lucie in their hands.
The testers will come from the waitlist, and for now they’ll need an iPhone. In the coming weeks we’ll be asking the people on it whether they’d like to take part. If you’d like to be one of them, we’d love to have you involved. There’s a waitlist at lucie.money.