Met during flat hunting, how this duo plans to build your personal finance manager
Outspending your salary? No savings? Don’t know where the money is draining? Welcome to the club. As young professionals, most of us have cash debited messages swarming our inbox, with no time to make sense of them.
So how do I know where my money is going? Money View might be able to give you the answer.
After running a 17-year-long stint in the US, serving leadership positions at mobile billing services and acting as product leader at Google, Puneet Agarwal chose to return to his roots. While hunting for flats to stay in Bengaluru, Puneet bumped into Sanjay.
Prior to this, Sanjay co-founded MingleBox, an education portal and had served spent significant time with corporates like Yahoo and Infosys.
Thus, startup culture came naturally to them. Soon, flat hunting stemmed into brewing conversations and led to the creation of Money View.
Wondering how it works?
According to the co-founders, Money View is an application designed to give you a single view into what’s happening with your money. It tracks all the daily expenses by sifting through the debit/ credit card messages received from the bank on your phone. Thus, letting you know your expenditure on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Moreover, it tries to understand your spending pattern and reminds you to pay your bills on time. Unlike other apps, Money View organises all the data through SMSs, without one having to manually segregate them.
The app claims to automatically pre-categorise and understand transactions made with over 1 million merchants. Talking on the same, the co-founders tell us:
“Our addressable market is the pool of 200 million individuals who have bank accounts worth 40 crore. We want to be an individual’s personal money manager. Our long term vision is to make individuals financially fit. ”
Milestone funding
Earlier this year, the venture raised a funding of almost USD 8.5 million from Tiger Global, Accel India and Ribbit Capital. The team plans to use this funding to work on the next generation of the product.
It is also looking at investing a part of this funding in consumer acquisition activities, building the brand. Moreover, looking at expanding their team size while looking at hiring, the co-founders aim to double their technical team strength by the end of this year. Starting off with just the two of them, currently, they are an active functioning team of 40 odd-individuals. Their primary spending remains to be on the technology they’re using to power the product.
Product focus
Moving forward, the duo’s focus lies in establishing a trusted brand in the personal finance management application segment. They are also looking at moving from just notifying users of their savings, to notifying them about potential investments that can be made.
“Our aim is to help our users stay on top of their finances with zero effort. With our focus continuously on adding features and offerings that help our users stay financially fit. For instance, one of the things the app helps user with is to start saving more by managing his expenditure. The users will soon be able to find smart ways to invest their savings from within the app. “
The app hit a million downloads early this year. Since the product is free, the firm does not have an active revenue model in place. It follows month-on-month metrics, and claims to be growing at almost 100 per cent. In the last one month, the brand has grown and added 3,00,000 new users.
According to Gartner, India’s app economy is to double over two years to reach Rs 2,000 crore by 2016. Another report from IAMAI says India witnesses 100 million downloads per month with 3G connections and is expected to touch 272 million from a mere 35 million in 2012. These statistics leverage immense potential for application market in India.
However, there are multiple applications in the financial management market functioning with the same concept as MoneyView. Facing competition from Walnut, Gullak and MyUniverse, the product seems to be hanging on to technology as its key differentiator. In the coming months, it will be interesting to see how this company will bring the necessary differentiation to rise above its competition and generate a value proposition in the minds of their customers.