Fresh Features: ‘Shake to hide’ by Monese

Fintech and innovation go hand in hand, Fresh Features is our weekly rundown of the best weird and wonderful fintech app features you might not even know about.

A whole host of apps come across our desk each day and this new weekly series is an opportunity for us to share our favourite app features that you should probably know about.

We'll be covering everything from digital banking apps and trading to savings and investment to show you the top innovative and downright quirky features that have caught our eye. So let's get started.

Feature of the week: ‘Shake to hide’

First up this week comes from digital banking service Monese.

The fintech has integrated a great privacy feature to its app to stop Peeping Toms from getting a load of your finances. 

In the app, users are able to activate ‘Privacy Mode’, which can be turned on and off manually in the settings tab or, and here’s where it gets fun, users can shake their phone to hide their balance.

Details of merchants, dates and times of transactions are still listed, but the amounts are not.

You can even launch Monese straight into Privacy Mode by holding down the app on your home screen, perfect for when you want to show off the app to friends and family but don’t want to show them how much money you’ve squandered in Pret.

The feature is also great for those of us out there who, in typical British fashion, don’t like talking about money but still want to show off their swish new banking app.

Honourable mentions: Emma, Kuda and VibePay

In a similar vein to Monese, there are other fintech apps out there with similar features.

Money management app Emma allows customers to hide their balance by using ‘Scramble Mode’.

When selected, the app will show all balances in Yen, rather than your chosen currency.

The reason Emma’s Scramble Mode was pipped to the post is that it’s just a bit more clunky to use and you can’t open the app using the privacy feature right away.

Also, I found a bug when I was playing around with the app and looking at how I could save money on my gas and electricity bills in Scramble Mode, as when I turned Scramble Mode off while looking at cheaper tariffs, the policies remained in Yen. 

Not exactly helpful to someone that doesn’t know the exchange rate off the top of their head. 

Similarly, African-focussed digital banking service Kuda has a private mode to hide balances from wandering eyes.

Once turned on, users can shake their phone to show a ‘Panic Balance’, which will display a lower balance, of the user’s choosing, in the app and secondly, customers can hide their balances altogether in private mode.

Payments app VibePay also allows you to 'scramble' your balances in the app.

Simply head to the settings and select scramble and balances and transactions from your connected bank accounts will show as random numbers, offering customers an added level of privacy for when you want to show the app off. 

Seen a Fresh Feature out there that we should be writing about? Let us know editorial@altfi.com