Thanks for the response, Grant. It was great to see the roadmap reveal and the features coming down the pipe; I’m looking forward to seeing many of them come to fruition.
Regarding shared banking, joint chequing is definitely the real solution I’m looking for. We only use e-transfers right now because it’s the only instant way to move money between our separate accounts, but if we had a unified joint space for bills, that bottleneck would basically disappear. I’m interested to see how that rolls out and how the day-to-day experience feels once it’s live.
On the budgeting side, I appreciate the need for a strong business case. For me, it’s less about insights into the past and more about the ability to plan where my money is intended to go. Since Neo has the Build and Grow memberships, a robust budgeting tool feels like a natural value-add for those tiers. It’s nice to see what I’ve spent, but it’s better to know where I’d like to spend it.
I’m actually in the process of transitioning my direct deposits over to Neo now, so I’m looking forward to making this my primary hub. One small quality of life feature I realized I missed in my last post is the ability to send one-time e-transfers without saving the contact. I do a lot of buying and selling on Marketplace and other private sales where I’ll never need that contact again.
I’m not sure how complicated it would be to implement, but it’s a small feature that Simplii Financial has built into their app that I find I use quite often. Given how much people use online marketplaces now, I’m sure others would find it useful too. I’m not sure what other banks have a similar solution, but it’s definitely the one specific feature from my Simplii account that I find myself missing here.
I will take the e-transfer question to the guy I know that works with Interac. I’m actually in complete agreement, I don’t really understand why contacts have to be saved for an e-transfer in most flows and would LOVE to see a system where I don’t have to.
For the exact same reason. I hate clutter and I hate throwing things out, so I end up using Marketplace a lot.
+1 from me on the investment side of things. I currently have all my investments on Questrade. If there was a bit more control and accounts (TFSA, RRSP, RESP) on NEO I would likely switch it all over - the last piece of the puzzle is that Questrade is industry leading in the management fees for managed accounts (from what I have researched in years previous) which is a nice bonus, but if it was marginal I would prioritize having everything in one spot.
I believe the 9% cashback on groceries was a much stronger incentive for customers to switch to Neo.
I’d also like to see Neo consider waiving the annual credit card fee for customers who maintain at least $20,000 in a Neo Grow Account, as they represent top-tier customers.
Another feature that would be very attractive is a secured line of credit, where customers can use their deposits as collateral and borrow at a competitive rate (around 3.5–4% APR). I’m not sure whether offering loans at that rate would make business sense for Neo, but it would certainly be a compelling feature that would differentiate Neo from competitors.
The most common form of secured line of credit are Home Equity Line of Credits (HELOC). In order to get the best rates on a HELOC, the loan must be in first place (not behind a mortgage with a different lender). Even in that case, the best rate most people can get is prime + 0.5% (4.95% currently). Neo would have to put liquidity restrictions on an applicant’s savings account in order to use it as collateral for a loan or line of credit but if they did, they could probably consider it at least as safe and as reliable as a primary mortgage on Canadian real estate. The problem is that I can’t imagine too many people would want to borrow at 4+% against the funds they locked in a savings account that only pays 2.75%.
Since I currently only have a Neo Credit card and not a cash account, I would appreciate the ability to auto-pay my credit card from an external bank, to protect me from interest if I forget. Currently this function only supports auto-pay from a Neo cash account. I realize this may have been an intentional limitation to encourage clients to sign up for the cash account and move their work payroll deposit there, but I’m just not interested in doing that.