Managing personal finance is something that everyone of us do. As we get more responsibilities, the number of bank accounts and financial accounts we handle might get out of hand.
Australia based Pocketbook wants to help make money management simple. The Sydney-based startup does this by aggregating a user’s bank accounts, credit cards, loans, rewards programs and providing a single view of their money.
Once you connect Pocketbook to your bank account, it automates pretty much everything. By syncing with your bank accounts, it is able to keep track of every cent you spend, showing data in real time so that you’re always up to date with your finances.
Earlier this month, the company shared that 50,000 Aussies use Pocketbook to manage their personal finance. That is a lot of people.
Vulcan Post speaks to Bosco Tan, one of the creator for Pocketbook to find out the sudden growth in mobile users.
How different is the usage and user behaviour for your mobile vs desktop users?
We see markedly different types of usage patterns on the mobile versus the desktop: frequency, time of day and time of week. We noticed that our mobile users come back and use our mobile app to check their finances everyday.
Users typically check things out first thing in the morning, on their public commute to work, or on their way home where they are making a decision to eat-out or eat-in.
The website on the other hand is a weekly experience. Typically we see our users using it on Sunday afternoon or evening, when they’re recapping last week and looking forward to the week ahead. This Sunday usage coincides with the weekly summary email we send everyone on Sunday morning, which has all the necessary summary information for the week that just happened.
How are your mobile users discovering your service? Is it mostly through the app store?
There’s a lot of discovery on the mobile app stores. We’ve done a lot of work to be competitive around all the necessary keywords that people search for – for a product like ours. Besides this however, we’ve been very lucky. Apple has featured us front and centre on their Australian Appstore as one of their favourites, CNET has called our mobile app “the best app of its kind (they’ve) ever seen” and we’ve been mentioned numerous times on Sunrise – the biggest breakfast TV show in Australia.
How much has the product changed since we last spoke? Any new features?
The product is evolving, it’s getting smarter. The key direction for 2014 is to make Pocketbook the personal assistant to your money. This means it needs to behave like a real personal assistant – bringing to attention everything you should know and making sure all the menial tasks are done for you – like the recent movie “Her”.
So over the next few months, we’re introducing a range of new additions to the product, including goal setting, smarter alerts and a more user friendly dashboard. Almost like a ‘Fitbit’ for your finances.
So far Pocketbook is focusing on the Australia market. Are there plans to explore other countries?
Australia is home and we know the consumer behaviour here well, so we’re using this geography as the place to hone in on the perfect product. Once we get this right, we’ll expand. We’ve already looked a a number of geographies – having physically visited New Zealand, Singapore and the UK. These are all possibilities for going forward. So in short, we’ve already started exploring, but it’s all about timing.
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