Money is Time

In May last year when I met Alistair Darling he joked that he could “use some KashFlow” at the Treasury. Despite the sad truth behind his joke, I doubt I could give any useful advice to the Treasury.

However, there is something our developers could teach the banks about, and that’s efficiency.

Why do you use an ATM / hole-in-the-wall / cashpoint? To get money out –  right? You just want a few £20 notes from your bank account.

So why does a typical cashpoint session go something like this:

• Insert Card
• Enter PIN
• Choose from menu of options for what service you want (Balance Enquiry, Statement, Cash, etc)
• You choose “Cash”
• Do you want a receipt? Yes/No
• Choose “No”
• Take cash
• Do you want another service? Yes / No
• Choose “No” 
• Take your card.

I’m willing to bet that 90%+ of people that use a cash machine, just want to get cash. So why not, after taking our PIN, take us straight to a screen to enter how much money we want with no receipt and then immediately give us our card back?

So our new and improved session goes something like this:

• Insert card
• Enter PIN
• Select amount of Cash
• Take cash
• Take card

They can include an “Other services” button at the top of the screen – but default to the most popular option. 

By default, when you log in to KashFlow you start at the Overview page. But under Settings -> Advanced Settings you can change this to a starting page that suits you better. Thus enabling you to make more efficient use of your time.

So there you go, we’ve just halved the amount of time you spend at a cash machine. What does that add up to over the course of a typical week in the UK? How many times have you missed a train or bus because you’ve spent too long struggling with a menu of options at the cash point?

I think I’ve just saved the economy single-handed. What does one wear when one is receiving a knighthood?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 9:45 am and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.