The Credit Card Tools Hiding in Your Banking App

If you’re using your credit card issuer’s app or website just to pay your bills and check in on some recent transactions, you’re only tapping into a fraction of the features available to you.

We’ve been able to pay bills online for more than 25 years, but that’s table stakes now. Banks are competing with each other to roll out tools that can help customers see spending trends, set their budget, manage recurring charges and improve account security.

“We started looking at the online experience as the new battleground,” says Adam Winchester, head of experience for consumer and small business payments at U.S. Bank. “If we can win there, we can win market share.”

Get data on spending and tips to save more

Your banking app and website can translate your individual purchases into a longer-term look at your spending trends. Some provide virtual assistants, like Capital One’s Eno, the U.S. Bank Smart Assistant, and Bank of America®’s Erica, that can make suggestions on ways you can save money, including reviewing recurring charges to make sure you’re not spending without realizing it. Your spending can be displayed in helpful graphs that make data on your expenses clearer, so you can make adjustments to your budget if needed.

This works well if all of your accounts and credit cards are from one bank, but that’s not the case for many people. According to Winchester, a limitation of some banking apps is the inability to link accounts from other financial institutions. If you juggle multiple cards and have accounts elsewhere, what you see when logged into your account at one bank isn’t going to give you your full financial picture.

Some apps have solved this issue by allowing you to link outside accounts. Chase, for example, can show you information from your other credit cards, banking and investment accounts within its app.

If you have multiple apps with this capability, pick the one with the user experience you find the easiest to navigate and understand, says Beth Robertson, managing director of Keynova Group, a financial services intelligence firm. “You have to set it up one time, but from there on out, you can get a really good compilation of information.”

Keep your card secure

You can regularly check your card activity for suspicious purchases, and also set up alerts that will notify you of any charges over a certain amount. You can even freeze or lock your account if your physical card is missing to prevent someone else from using it (unfreezing also takes mere seconds, in case you realize your card was safe the whole time).

But account security isn’t just about knowing where your physical card is. It’s also important to know who else has access to your account data, such as merchants storing your card information for later purchases, or businesses where you have a recurring membership payment, like gyms. Many banking apps let you see who has access to your data, and some allow you to revoke that access from within the app.

Robertson recently granted data access to a company that determined her eligibility for a mortgage. Once the approval process was complete, she took away that company’s ability to see her financial information.

Bank of America® offers a security meter on its website and app that shows your account security level and suggests steps you can take to protect your accounts even more. This includes actions like updating your password and setting up two-factor authentication.

Check in on your credit scores

Many banks offer customers the ability to not just see their credit scores, but also learn about how different actions can raise or lower those scores. This can provide important context for anyone who experienced a recent score change, or who is hoping to grow their credit before applying for a loan. Your app can also generate an action plan if you’d like to build your credit.