How Your Smartphone can Keep You on Top of Your Finances

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t have a smartphone in this day and age. These devices have quickly evolved over the last decade to be much more than just a way of making calls; today they can help manage pretty much all aspects of our lives from event calendars to social media.

Your finances are of course no exception and you can make your fiscal situation much healthier in a variety of ways – all from the palm of your hand. What follows below are a number of examples of this and how you can benefit.

Banking Apps

The days of heading to the bank to take out money and deal with your accounts is quickly becoming a thing of the past as now you find that most of the major banks and lenders have their own apps. As aforementioned, these can be used to handle your accounts, but you can also set up online payments and move money in a matter of seconds.

Direct Contact with Lenders

Thanks to the video calling technology that most modern smartphones have, you can now contact lenders directly without having to visit them face to face. What’s more, you can now digitally sign contracts or make agreements without having to travel anywhere.

Text Alerts

Many banks, lenders and credit card providers such as Ocean Finance for instance now provide their clients with text alerts for a variety of reasons. It might be to remind them to regularly check their balance, or to get updates on their accounts as a financial ‘health check’ of sorts. On top of this, they can also be used as security measures to provide access codes and passwords if needed, getting rid of the need to ring busy call centres.

Payment Options

Smartphones can now be used like chip and pin cards and contactless payments can be made via apps and different banking services. This can be incredibly useful if you’ve lost or damaged your card, or if you prefer not to carry cash and cards around with you. Again, security is key here and smartphones can have measures in place to require passwords, fingerprint scanning and more to be used.

The best thing about all of this though is that this has all happened in the last decade and we are potentially on the verge of yet more technological advancements. In other words, there may be even more to look forward to in the coming years and that we may even see the end of high-street banks as we know it and banking may become fully digitised.