Topic Area
Frequently Asked Questions
Relevant to users on:
Money Dashboard Neon and Classic
Not sure which App you are on?
If you are unsure if you are on Money Dashboard Classic or Money Dashboard Neon? You can find that information here
Outline
- The Classic application has served Money Dashboard really well to date. However, from a technical standpoint, it would not allow us to cost-effectively scale our user base or deliver features as quickly as we would like.
- It also does not take advantage of some of the new technology other parts of the company have developed more recently, such as machine learning (ML) based categorisation with feedback loops that enable us to sort your transactions with a high level of accuracy.
How have we tackled some of the challenges we face?
To tackle this, the first thing we looked at was "can we re-engineer what we currently have?". The answer, of course, was "yes". However, the deeper question was "can we re-engineer what we currently have to obtain the key benefits of development speed and scalability in a cost-effective manner?". This is a trickier question to answer and required us to go into a deeper level of technical detail. When evaluated against the criteria of what we are trying to achieve, the answer to the question was "no". We devised a plan that would allow us to re-architect various parts of the application. However, as we started to tick off against the criteria list we got two things happening - cost started to go up and the amount of code we would rewrite was increasing.
We also knew that we would need to access banks and institutions in a new way due to the PSD2/open banking legislation which came into effect on 14th March 2020. When the factors of cost, new code, existing building blocks, product issues and technical debt were taken into consideration the best route to achieve the goal criteria was a ground up technical rebuild. And, as we were doing that, a new product rebuild seemed in order too - allowing an easier more coherent way for users to achieve the "jobs to be done" of a financial application.