UBS removing Personal Financial Advisor functionality

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1

Went in to my UBS e-banking app to make a payment. As always I assign a category to each payment so I can track my expenses by categories in their Personal Financial Advisor section - mainly on the web site.
This time I got a notification that the “categorization” functionality will be removed in November (2023) in the phone app… but continue till fall 2024 on the web, part of decommissioning the PFA offering.

No mention of why (except “…technology moves on”!!!) and no word on any replacement.

Now looking to move on. Any other of the new (digital) platforms offer that type of expense tracking/categorization?

2

Neon offers spending categorization, although no budgeting like UBS did AFAIK.

3

Create your own with Excel or similar. Advantages: functions exactly as you want it to plus this kind of thing won’t happen again :blush:

4

I do and have. Its how I do my budgeting. But it was based on the categorizations from the banking app. If they remove that, I have to go back to the tedious manual entry of every transaction/category and then working of that base.

5

So you imported the date from ubs into Excel/equivalent directly?
I’d estimate about 3-5 minutes per month to enter the data of my variable expenses into Excel-equivalent manually so not exactly “tedious”. All recurrent expenses are pre-entered.

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Not exactly… I’d do about 4 updates max to my excel a year. The sheet gives me annual forecasts based on my current spending/assets. This was used to confirm that I was still within my own set spending limits. So I’d just check/update about 20 values taken from the web site (e.g. household, health, living expenses, comms…etc). No transaction entry, no categorization as that was done by the bank anyway. I just made sure my excel categories matched theirs. Been working wonderfully for me last 7 or 8 years. I used it to see if it was viable for me to retire (early) nearly 8 years ago. It was. I did. :blush:

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7

dammit - they must have used the same vendor as PostFinance for e-cockpit :smiley:

neon is rubbish (I’m using it and actively hating it).

8

Do you think they will offer some other spending analysis / categorization post 2024? It looks extremely odd that with all AI functionality being explored they make one step backwards

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9

This is why :
UBS key4 insights | UBS Switzerland.

Next personal finance tracking tool coming “soon” :grinning:.

PS: a bit more detail here in the study (DE content) :

UBS appears to have made substantial investments in cutting-edge technology such as AI. Their primary focus is on addressing the needs of enterprises, but some of these technologies are also making their way to the end customer. An example of this is their partnership with Yokoy, a company specializing in AI-driven spending management systems

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10

Many thanks for the info and links. It does indeed look promising, reading the IFZ Retail Banking blog

I just checked my account and looks like I am not one of the chosen ones (50’000 of them according to the article) so will just wait till “key 4 insights” surfaces for me as well.

Now why couldn’t they think to add this info to the message that PFA was going to be retired? It really sounded like “Hey tough. We’re taking it away”. :wink:

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11

I had the same thought. This will service will no longer be available we are working on offering some newer or xxx

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Because I suspect the rollout will take some time and they do it by “grapes”, so little by little.

But yeah, communication (and transparency) could certainly improve…