This is the story of something that I¹ am building — an idea called autofi.
Autofi is pronounced “auto-fy”, not “auto-fee”. It’s short for autonomous finance; but that’s a story for another time. This story is about why I’m building autofi.
The Backstory
Among the many challenges of middle age, the one that caught my attention recently was bills!
By bills, I mean any payment that is made every month — rent, maintenance, salaries for driver, maid, cook, tutor; school fees, gym fees, phone bills, electricity bills, credit card bills, music classes, sports classes, dhobi yada yada yada.
The basic challenge posed by bills is - there are just too many of them!
An average household pays 15 bills every month. Add kids to the equation, and the count jumps to 20.
And it’s not as if they all turn up on the same day. No, that would be too easy!
Just to illustrate, my Vodafone bill comes on the 21st but my wife’s comes on the 15th. Consequently they have different due dates.
When one has so many bills; all with different due dates, chaos is imminent. And chaos manifests in late payments, missed payments and the sheer stress that accompanies trying to be on top of it all.
Try this:
When is your next bill due?
How about the one after that?
Struggling? I’m not surprised!
What compounds the problem is the incessant SMS alerts and reminders. And they are not helpful at all: “Ignore if already paid”.
Thanks!!! How difficult is it to check if I’ve made the payment, before sending me this blast SMS! I’m typically panic-stricken and left scrambling to investigate whether I did indeed pay my bill.
As an aside, what really rankles with bills are the late fees. They are more insult than injury. A Rs 50 late fee on my phone bill is really saying “you can’t even get this one thing right”.
No wonder the chaos and stress.
What a tangled web we weave
The next logical step for me was to find out how others managed their bills. After all, someone must have cracked this rather universal problem!
The findings were interesting.
While some relied on their memory, others used calendars — physical and digital — to set reminders. Still others, brave souls, paid their bills as soon as they came in.
I promptly tried all these tricks. They all failed.
They failed because bills and the subsequent reminders have an uncanny habit of arriving when you’re the busiest or the most distracted. The pings merely served the purpose of being irritants and often got lost in the mental clutter. And a few bills almost always managed to slip through the cracks!
Then a friend suggested auto-pay — this wonderful panacea for all bill-ills.
So I put my bills on auto-pay on my credit card. The credit card would automatically pay my bills. And I would have to pay one single credit card bill each month.
But beautiful as it sounds, some problems still remained. I was still having to deal with bills that credit cards can’t pay: rent, maintenance to the RWA, gym fees, salaries, tuition fees yada yada yada.
Moreover, with auto-pay, I suddenly lost control. I did not get a chance to “approve” a payment, after looking at a bill and seeing if everything was okay. It was rather unnerving, because all it took was one contentious bill to automatically get paid, for all hell to break loose.
I took my bills off auto-pay, and was back to square one.
The Eureka Moment!
It all came to me one day, when I was interacting with my finance guy from work.
Why not have an assistant to take care of all your bills?
As I began to think this through, the contours of this assistant became clearer.
- The assistant would keep a track of all my bills: when are they due and how much is to be paid
- As far as possible, the assistant would bring the bills to me in a bunch: so I don’t spend time dealing with one bill today and another one tomorrow
- The assistant would come to me at a time convenient to me: not at 8 am on Monday morning which is what Vodafone seems to prefer
- All I should have to do is approve a payment, or edit an amount (if necessary), and then leave it to the assistant to make the payments
- When I do happen upon an “Ignore if paid” SMS, I should just be able to check with the assistant if I have indeed paid this bill
- The assistant should keep records. So I should be able to ask my assistant questions like, how much was my credit card bill last month? (for instance)
This began to sound interesting. And soon enough, I decided to build a chatbot to be this assistant; and named it autofi.
Once it was ready, I got my mum on it. And my extended family. And then some friends.
Every day I looked for validation — is autofi really solving a problem? And to my pleasant surprise, it was indeed.
The folks using autofi have come back saying that they’ve stopped keeping track of their bills. Autofi does it for them.
The reminder keepers have stopped setting reminders.
The habitual late payers are now paying their bills on time.
No one has complained of being disturbed at odd hours.
But most of all, folks, in general, are much less stressed about their bills.
Et tu?
I have told you this story because I believe that autofi can help you with your bills too.
But is autofi right for you?
Well, if you’ve read this far, chances are that you empathise with the need for a bill management service like autofi.
Nonetheless, here are some questions that can help you decide:
- How many bills do you pay in a month? These include all payments like rent, gym fees, salaries etc. But do not include cash payments. Autofi can’t make cash payments for you.
More than 5
Less than 5
If you have a lot of bills, you will find autofi useful. If you have a handful of bills and they are all due around the same time, then you probably don’t need autofi.
2. Do you find it hard to keep track of bills? Do you miss payments? Do you pay late fees?
Yes
No
Autofi works best for those who lose track of bills, miss payments and pay late fees. In some cases, late fees can lower your credit ratings. So it is always best to pay on time.
3. Do bills cause stress and anxiety?
Yes
No
If your answer is “Yes”, you should try autofi.
All you need to know
If you think you may want to use autofi, there are three things I’d like you to know.
(Thing One)
Autofi is not a VC-play. It is not a fintech startup looking to be a unicorn. I don’t want to have millions of customers. I am not looking to raise venture capital. And I don’t want autofi to scale quickly so I can sell out.
I want to build a small to mid-size sustainable business.
I need a few thousand customers but I want them to love autofi. And they’ll do so because autofi will take pains to understand and solve their day to day financial problems.
That is enough to pay our bills (no pun intended).
Bill management is the first solution out of a bouquet of services autofi hopes to provide.
Which is why, while Autofi is free for now; very soon I plan to charge a fee for it. A small, reasonable fee. The fee is important not just for keeping the lights on but also to keep your data private.
“If you’ve been playing poker for half an hour and you still don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”
There is no such thing as a free service. By charging a fee, autofi won’t need to sell your data to third parties to keep its lights on.
I want to spend another moment on the issue of data safety and privacy. Because that is important to me and I am sure to you too.
Let me start by saying that, in general, your financial data is neither private nor safe. The government knows, your bank knows, your credit card company knows, your digital wallet knows, your email knows, any app on your phone that can read your SMS knows. And any employee or contractor working for any of these entities who wants to know, can know. This is even before you start on the hackers/crackers.
If you use autofi, the level of safety and privacy won’t change dramatically. I will know about your bills as will autofi employees (when/if they are hired). But I don’t expect your data to go out any further than that.
Autofi will charge a fee. And autofi won’t sell your data. You can hold me to that promise.
My mum’s data is in there as is my own data. And so I will safeguard your data as well as I safeguard my own.
(Thing Two)
The second thing that you need to know is how autofi works behind the chatbot.
Technology has made payments harder not easier. There are just too many hoops to jump through: PINs, OTPs, passwords & shuffling between apps.
To make the bill payment process smooth, autofi uses NACH. You may already be using this if you have a home loan or a car loan or have SIPs in mutual funds.
Owing to NACH, whenever you approve a bill of amount ‘x’, your bank transfers amount ‘x’ from your account to autofi, which autofi uses to pay your bill.
It is important that you be comfortable with this process of bill payment if you’d like to use autofi.
BTW, 30 million people in India use NACH to make recurring payments.
(Thing Three)
The autofi chatbot works on Telegram. If you are not familiar with Telegram, it is a messaging app much like WhatsApp. You can download it here.
To use autofi, you’ll need to install Telegram on your phone. That is all I have to say about that.
Now you have to make a choice:
Take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
Take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth.
If you want to see first hand how autofi works, download the Telegram app and try our demo bot by clicking here.
If you want to sign-up for autofi, get onto Telegram and ping @AmitWilson or @Shantanu_Kumar.
Cheers
Footnotes:
1 — Autofi is being built by Amit Wilson and Shantanu Kumar. “I” refers to either.
