Emma, a millennial-focused money management app popularly known as the “financial advocate” within the UK is expanding its territory to the crypto world by introducing a crypto management feature in its system.
Emma technologies is the company underpinning the Emma app, an artificial intelligence feature in Android and iOS which hitherto has agreed to work with only a handful of renowned financial institutions the likes of Bank of Scotland, HBSC AND Barclays among others. Users of these banks are able to use the feature to save money, prevent extra charges and manage debts in a seamless fashion.
The startup is now integrating with a number of crypto exchanges to enable users to easily monitor their crypto balances, an idea that is set to revolutionize the way modern PFM type apps operate. Traditionally, though customized to track the financial life of users, the apps have only been limited to fiat currencies stored in credit cards of traditional banks in spite of rapid change and disruptions brought about by virtual currencies.
“If Emma is able to help people control and manage a current account [traditional fiat currency account], she should be able to do the same for any type of financial product or service,” Emma’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Edoardo Moreni said
The launch
Once fully operational, the feature is expected to support many cryptocurrency exchanges including Bitfinex, Binance, Bittrex, Kraken, and Coinbase. For the time being, however, users of these exchanges will only be able to track balances of Bitcoin and Ethereum; the two leading cryptocurrencies. Moreni said they were integrating cryptocurrencies into their system in response to the ever-growing customer demand.
Yes, they were asking for crypto. Coinbase is more popular than several high street banks within our base, so it was pretty evident we needed to do something about this,” He said
“Read-only” access
The new crypto feature will be available in “Read-only” access mode which implies that in the meantime, users will not be able to make cryptocurrency transactions within Emma. However, that will soon change as Moreni explains:
“We are going to release several write features in both spaces, traditional and crypto…In terms of the later, we are already talking with a few providers to introduce write transactions and also the ability to save in cryptocurrency, based on behavioral rules and risk appetite.”
Emma is optimistic that streamlined financial access for users will play an important role in moving the crypto industry into the mainstream market.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/18/emma-crypto/