This is an embarrassing article.
It’s approaching the end of the financial year now, which means that, like a lot of households, we’ve spent the last week or two pulling together receipts and things in preparation for our annual tax returns (yes we are ahead of the game for once).
Which is how my wife (hereinafter referred to as ‘Augusta’) ended up in my office yesterday with a look on her face I recognised.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Augusta said. “You remember that trip to Melbourne I took back in December?”
I did. There was a charge on our joint account, she explained, from a hotel in Melbourne for $626.15. The thing is, she never stayed in a hotel. She stayed in an Airbnb; she has the bill for it, and she’d already seen that payment go through the account. So what was the $626.15?
Neither of us can work it out. The merchant name and the bank’s description don’t match any hotel we can identify. And so six months on, the best Augusta can do is try to dispute it through the bank. And yeah… we both suspect that ship has well-and-truly sailed. The $626 is gone probably.
Now to the part I’m personally embarrassed about: it’s a joint account. I see the transactions too (if I look). I could have spotted that charge as easily as Augusta, at any point over the last six months. I didn’t. Neither of us did. And look at me: I’ve spent my whole career in banking, write on money management and am building a personal money agent to help with exactly these types of things! We are, on paper, about as well-equipped to catch this as a household gets, and yet the transaction sat there unnoticed from December to now. How could I miss this? $626.15 is not a small amount.
The bank did its bit: we just didn’t look
The thing that gets me is this: the information was never hidden. That $626.15 charge sat in our account from the day it was made. Every time either of us opened the banking app it was right there in the list. The bank did its job.
What nothing did was look at it on our behalf and ask the obvious question: this doesn’t match anything we know about you; do you recognise it?
A bank will flag a transaction that it thinks looks odd: a payment in another country, an unusually large amount, maybe several repeat charges… the kind of patterns that trip fraud filters. But this one didn’t look odd. A hotel… in a city Augusta was genuinely visiting. There was nothing obviously fraudulent to catch. It only looked wrong when set against her actual behaviour, which was staying in an Airbnb instead.
But we didn’t see it; we didn’t look hard enough at our account; it was the lead up to Christmas; there was a lot on; I don’t know.
Most of us don’t look. Not because we don’t care, but because life is busy and a banking app full of perfectly legitimate transactions is the last thing anyone wants to audit line by line on a Tuesday night right?
Why six months matters
And of course in December, that charge was fresh. It was identifiable and potentially disputable. If either of us had questioned it then, we’d have had a chance at sorting it out: a recent transaction, a live trail.
But now, six months later, the trail is cold and the window for doing anything about it, if there’s one left at all, is closing or closed. Finding out in June is barely better than not finding out.
The value would have been in catching it in December. And catching it in December needed someone to be paying attention in December.
I think I need to be Lucie’s #1 customer
What this tells me is that if anyone will benefit from what we’re building it’ll be me.
This is the type of thing that Lucie Money is being built to catch: to notice, back in December, that a charge didn’t match any booking or pattern it knew about, and ask us there and then whether we recognised it. Not now; but back in December, while the trail was still warm.
I can’t promise it would have caught this precise one; Lucie isn’t even live yet. But it’s the whole reason we’re building it.
Now, the only thing left to do about it is write this.