Great premise, poorly executed
Firstly, the app doesn’t make use of other installed financial apps (e.g. Barclays, Monzo etc) to authorise the open banking request. This makes it an incredibly manual process to dig out usernames, account numbers, passwords and memorable information and so on. Other apps simply open the related bank’s app and asks for confirmed sharing.
Secondly, there are a number of providers who simply hit errors when trying to connect accounts with the app (MBNA as an example)
Thirdly, the app performance itself is incredibly inconsistent, with slow loading times, false error messages and prompts for reconnection immediately after first connecting.
In short, needs a lot of work to be considered a useful financial planning app, and I hope it gets sorted quickly.
Response from developer
Thanks for your feedback. We are sorry to hear that you have experienced some issues with our app. We are keen to understand these, fix and improve as quickly as possible. We are surprised to hear your experience on account connection. The app does make use of installed apps so if you have the Barclays or Monzo app installed they will be accessed using what ever method you use e.g. FaceID and the account connection authorised with one or two clicks. This should take just a few seconds. We have not experienced or had any feedback to date to suggest this is not working. If you can email me at ben@pennyworthfinancial.com I can then look into this issue that's impacting you in more detail. More generally on account connections - If the connection is not supported by Open Banking then they are managed through credential entry e.g. MBNA. There is no standard for this or requirement for the provider to enable this which means there may be issues from time to time as changes are made on the provider side. Broadening Open Banking application and developing it into Open Finance will enable apps such as Pennyworth to enable a much broader selection of connections, with standardised connections that will be more stable. We are a big proponent of this and are at the forefront of the industry pushing for this change to help consumers. With regards the error messages, we are aware of an issue with our Manual Accounts feature and we will be publishing a minor release today that will fix this.