A Zapier Future For Business Banking

In the wonderful land of Zapier there is no excuse for procrastination, forgetfulness or lack of time.  Through a combination of ‘Zaps’ (essentially recipes, triggers or actions you setup) you can create a ying for every yang.  Since launching in 2012, Zapier has built a platform that allows you to connect and setup automated activities between a huge list of the world’s most popular apps, software & websites. A simple example works like this. If you get a lot of invoices emailed to you as an attachment, you can set up a ‘Zap’ that automatically saves new invoices to a chosen folder in your Google drive.

So what has Zapier got to do with banking?  Well…everything! The way we see it at Thriday, Zapier is the closest thing to the future of business banking that we have seen yet. You see, we think the future of banking is not banking at all. Business owners don’t want to bank. They only do it because they have to. Business owners want to spend time growing sales, hiring great talent and ultimately making their customers happy. The beauty of Zapier is that it takes away the work of doing monotonous and repetitive tasks, of which banking has many. Can you imagine the possibilities if Zapier was applied to banking, accounting and tax?

At its most basic, business owners could set up some simple actions like, ‘If I have more than $3,000 in my account by the end of the month, transfer $1000 to my High Interest Saver’. Want to get a bit more sophisticated? Try ‘If I purchase flights to Singapore > allow transactions in Singapore on my credit card’ or, ‘receive an invoice > automatically schedule a payment out on the due date.’ In the long term it could become all encompassing and essentially reduce banking and accounting to a 20 minute activity each week. With this in mind, Thriday has a vision to build a deeply personalised, smart and proactive service that does all the banking, accounting and tax on behalf of our business customers.

So how will Thriday pull this off?  In a nutshell, by leveraging recent improvements in Data Science, Machine Learning, paired with the power and usability of your smartphone.  New Data Science techniques make it possible to automate a vast chunk of your business’ financial admin tasks. As transactions happen, Thriday can determine what to do next to best suit the needs of a particular business.  This becomes really powerful when you consider just how many business owners use a smartphone everyday.  Without the ability to advise customers that an action has taken place, or give customers the option to edit or stop an action, the value of a product like Thriday would simply break down.

The growth and success of Zapier could be a watershed moment for banking.  It really opened the eyes of Team Thriday to the opportunity to do rather than to wait.  With new technology, innovation and business needs, it’s time to change the paradigm and lift business banking out of the dark ages.  The vision of Thriday is to take the banking out of banking. To give time back, to save money, to make money and do it with the least amount of effort possible. If this happens, then the future of Thriday couldn’t be Zapier, I mean happier...