Review: Standard Charted Breeze

The information in Breeze is clearly presented.

Standard Chartered’s Breeze is an online banking application that was recently released by Standard Chartered. It offers almost everything that you would expect from a standard online banking application: you can use this app to check your bank balance, transfer funds, look up recent transactions and pay bills.

This is the bank's first transactional app for the iPhone and Singapore is the first place in the world to have the opportunity to use this app, mainly because the bank's consumer banking group is based here in Singapore. Breeze will be rolled out to other markets over the next few months.

I have two Visa cards with Standard Chartered as well as a checking account so I decided to give this app a whirl.

When you log on, you can see your bank balance and your credit card balance, presented as "i have" and "i owe", which is a nice way to summarize your financial position. When you log on with your username and password, the only thing you will be able to see is this summary. You will need to key in your second password, delivered via SMS, in order to proceed further.

The calendar view makes it easy to hone in on particular dates.

Once you’ve keyed in the second password, you see a screen that defaults to the “see my money” page which shows how much you have and owe. Tap on any of the accounts to get more details. I checked my credit card transactions and immediately found that I was paying for stuff I no longer use, so that was pretty useful. One unique thing about Breeze is that it allows you to see a calendar view so that you can go quickly to a date to see what was spent on that date.

Tap on “move my money” to pay bills, including your credit card ones, whether the cards are Standard Chartered ones or with other banks. Note that payees need to be set up via online banking on a regular PC first. You can’t currently add a payee via Breeze. There is also an eCheque function which allows you to send cheques to predetermined payees. Once again, you have to go online to set up the payee on a PC before you use this function, though a few institutions like HDB and CPF are already on the list.

According to the bank, over the next few months, they will be adding new features like bill reminders (which is something I really need). However, the feature I'm most looking forward to is the ability to add payees via the Breeze app itself. This means that you literally have your cheque book in your pocket at all times, which is handy when you need to write a cheque in an emergency.

Your cheque book on your iPhone. Very neat. 

Another neat thing about this app is that you can use it to find branches, ATMs (whether belonging to Standard Chartered or the ATM5 network), or AXS stations nearby. You can also use this app to locate merchants who have special offers for Standard Chartered card holders. I wish they would give you the ability to locate such merchants nearby though.

Breeze is not perfect. I managed to find a bug in the way it displayed the amount owing for my credit card. Coincidentally, I had paid my credit card early last month, mainly because I got tired of paying late fees. Unfortunately, the app could not tell that I had already paid the bill. Instead, the app showed that I had to pay $149.51 by June 7. In fact, the $149.51 was the total amount I had racked up during the new billing cycle, and it was actually due July 7, rather than June 7. I’ve filed a bug report with Standard Chartered and hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Not bug-free though.

I've been a Standard Chartered customer for more than 10 years and throughout that time, I have relied on my monthly statements to find out the state of my finances. Sure the bank offered phone banking but honestly, who voluntarily uses phone banking in order to check their balance or pay bills? I would rather go through a root canal than to have to negotiate the hell that is IVR. As a result, I have never bothered to really use my account. After all, most of use have a DBS account that works fine for most things. Now that I am finally able to check my account and do transactions via my iPhone, I am one happy customer. And the bank benefits as well because I am much more likely to use my Standard Chartered account more actively from now on.

Breeze is free. You can download it here.

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