What’s Wrong With Money Management Apps?

The popular hypothesis today, confirmed by many of the comments I received back, seems to be that the market is largely nascent because Americans do not actually care enough to keep track of their finances.

With more than 13 million users, Mint is considered the market leader in the PFM space. However, after being quickly acquired by Intuit in 2009 for $170m, the app has spent more than a decade failing to innovate.

While many competitors have emerged to challenge Mint, I believe most have fallen short in their ability to ‘manage’ finances.

Theoretically, with all of these new ‘fintech’ tools available, there should be infrastructure with rich API connectivity that allows for the movement of money across all of these applications through a PFM. Interesting companies like Astra Finance are building in the space of ‘autonomous money’, but many companies are still fairly siloed in their ... See more