> 1. Can your cash do this? [1] A breakdown of spending by my internet bank, by category.

Yes, but not automatically. You have to manually log all your spending by category yourself.

Big data has advantages but you have to trade off your privacy in exchange for the convenience.

Built in privacy for some people is a feature. For others it’s a bug.

>1. Can your cash do this? [1] A breakdown of spending by my internet bank, by category.

No, neither can it break down my spending habits for the banks, the government, and anyone else with access (authorized or not) to that data. One of the most important reasons I use cash.

> 4. In Sweden, and some other European countries (and China?) a lemonade stand works by person-to-person bank transfers, initiated using a mobile phone app. The Swedish one is called Swish, but I link to the Danish one [2] as they have an English explanation.

The United States has this via Venmo. But Venmo doesn't replace business transactions, only personal ones.

Unlike Venmo, Swish lets you transfer money instantly between bank accounts. There are no social features like profile pictures, emojis, or public transactions. And it uses proper authentication, rather than typing your banking password into a third-party app.

Venmo falls well short of the transfer apps in most countries.

The US equivalent would be Zelle, that is person to person. Venmo is person to Venmo to person.

> [1] http://i.imgur.com/Smkim6Vr.png

Is this month's data an outlier or do you really spend $1000/month on fast food?!

It's in Danish crowns, so more like $150, and I also moved it away from a month.

Also, I can recategorize any transaction, or all transactions from any merchant. I think I set the canteen at work to "fast food", as it's a food category I almost never spend in otherwise.

(The interface is the default view of my online banking, but otherwise, I don't use it. It's very swish, but fortunately I don't need to budget this way.)

We have a verb in swedish for this: "I'll swish you 50 crowns" "Can you swish me 200?"

In Denmark "I'll MobilePay you 50 crowns" or "can you MobilePay me 200?", at least when speaking English.

My Danish isn't good enough to reliably say what it is when speaking Danish. Probably something like "Jeg mobilepayer dig halvtres¹ kroner"

The system in Britain (Paym) hasn't really caught on. They might be less keen to verb a noun.

¹ This is why I avoid discussing numbers in Danish.

Strangely, I have never heard it verbed that way in Danish. Alle I ever hear is the slightly laborious 'sender dig på MobilePay'.

But then again, I'm ancient.

The verbification of a foreign language word easily becomes awkward: "Mobilpayer du mig lige 50?". Yes, Denmark is so anglofile they chose an English word for a Danish payment service.

In Norway it's "I'll vipps you 50 crowns" or "jeg vippser deg 50 kroner". The verb is actually in the Norwegian dictionary now.

Thanks. This adds to my Norwegian vocabulary :) Not that this is very useful to me right now, but who knows, that bit might change.

In Dutch, you send someone a Tikkie, which is a payment request. We haven't verbed it as far as I can tell.

It's common parlance around people I know to use "Monzo me a tenner". Monzo has taken off pretty incredibly in some areas, it's just a bank though.