What’s New with NgaturDuit.com and Amplop.in?

As reported in previous DailySocial article, NgaturDuit officially launched v2 of their financial services. This launch coincided with The Indonesian Financial Planning Expo event, but if you read NgaturDuit’s Twitter account, the users have been able to access it since March 25, 2011 (night).

NgaturDuit new look, as described by Api Perdana to DailySocial, "is quite different than the version-1 because now we’re using the dashboard concept, so all settings can be done in less than 3 steps."

This new version of NgarturDuit now comes with 3 columns, with the main menu option located at the top. The left part contains the features to manage accounts, view payable / receivable and manage budgets, while the right side contains a calendar feature and display a graphic summary. The middle is the main part of the display of various menus selected by the user.

Basically, all the features available in v1 is also in v2 but with the organization of which I think is neat and better. To add the account or the budget can be accessed on the left column, while everything related to the transaction categories are grouped in a single transaction menu (top) and will appear when we want to add new transactions.

Api Perdana of NgaturDuit also explained that the various changes that they are doing is one result of the cooperation undertaken with financial planner Akbar's Financial Check Up (AFC). This latest version also marks a paradigm shift of their services which are no longer provides a tool only, but has become a complete service. The users can not only keep records of their financial transactions and manage it but also find solutions to financial problems.

Some of the supporting features added to the latest version is the Investment and Consulting. For consultation, currently NgaturDuit provide it for free, so users can ask one question per topic to be answered by consultants from the AFC. The users have a maximum of 5 chances of discussion with a consultant. Unfortunately I did not find a detailed explanation about the procedure in NgaturDuit site. I tried to ask a question, but until now I did not get any reply to a discussion. There might be some errors in formatting questions or other information I did not fill in, but since there was no detailed explanation, I could not fix it.

NgaturDuit also got a pretty good reception on The Indonesian Financial Planning Expo event, Perdana explained that they got not only users who were interested but also some offers of interviews with the media and various cooperation. In this event, NgaturDuit also released their BlackBerry application in beta, which access is still limited to participants who came to the show. Its features were not yet complete as the web version or NgaturDuit mobile website; it only provided features that focus only on the input transaction.

NgaturDuit also plans to launch an application for Android users in April while the application for the iPhone / iPad is planned to released in May and get ready to add some other additional features on their service.

The competition in the financial regulator services is also quite exciting. We do not need to compare with external service, because in Indonesia alone, there are at least 3 services, and one of them is Amplop.in, which on the 28th also added two new features. The first one is a facility to copy (automatic) data envelope from the previous month which makes it easier for users because they no longer need to compile the data envelope that was created previously, and the other facility is the feature that will automatically add residual income on revenue transactions in the previous month.

One thing that is interesting, that these two features seem to directly updated after a Tweet from Natali Ardianto (Startuplokal initiator), which suggests Amplop.in to add the facility to copy the envelope. Amplop.in also recently introduced a subscribing system to their service. And if you see a description of the blog Amplop.in, they've got a few customers who are willing to pay to get more facilities from Amplop.in.

Each service tries to run the most appropriate strategy for their services, targeting the community to get on targeted users and listen to their users. Monetization strategies between the two services are also interesting to note. NgaturDuit will try to apply the fee paid for their consulting services, with a possible range of cost Rp. 10.000 - Rp. 25.000 / thread. Meanwhile, Amplop.in has implemented subscription fees according to the number of transactions per month. There are 5 packages offered including free packages.

Competition is good, as long as it bring positive improvements in services, innovation and focused on providing benefits to individual users. Now we shall wait for anyone else who will release the next news. Or perhaps other financial regulatory services, TrackPense, which also released a new feature recently, will re-release some additional features?

Translated by Nita Sellya.