Last month, I shared some tips on how to manage your money. This month, I am addressing why saving money is essential as well as some of my motivations for founding Wally.
I’m not a banker or app developer. The last company I founded was in e-commerce and this time around it was a personal finance app. Many people ask why the change? Quite simply, it was to answer my own questions, try and solve my own problems and help people in similar situations as myself.
Everyone dreams of their perfect vacation and waits eagerly for that time of the year. I found myself in a similar situation where planning for a holiday began for months; however despite all the planning the holiday was cancelled due to poor money management. It was this very incident that motivated me to source a tool to help manage my finances.
To my surprise, there was nothing that worked for me. The mobile finance market is flooded with hundreds of apps, but most of them had clunky, unintuitive interfaces or required banking integration that wouldn’t support my bank.
And thus Wally was born.
Our goal at Wally is quite simple – to help you to manage your money. Wally enables you to balance your income and expenses, understand where your money goes, set and achieve your financial goals. All of this is done in a seamless and intuitive manner.
As we started building the Wally team, it ended up consisting of millennials to exclusively address the issues facing this generation.
Gen Y and Millennials are generally more tech-savvy than Gen X. 30 per cent of us use four or more mobile devices and check phones on average at least 43 times each day. Moreover, there is a significant demand for hands-on personal finance management tools, due to the lack of trust in existing institutions, after witnessing the financial crisis of 2008 driven by the predatory lending and dishonest behaviour of banks.
As a result, less than a third of us millennials believe banks act in a fair and transparent way. 71 per cent of us would rather go to the dentist than listen to what our banks are saying![1]
Despite this, we still have a strong demand (and need!) for personal finance management, and more than 66 per cent of millennials create budgets for themselves and try to stick to them.[2]
With more than 4.2 million millennials in Australia[6], only 43% of them save; thereby making it one of the countries with the least number of adult savers. [8] A massive 84% of Australian millennials are counting on retirement funds and expecting to have access to the same sources of retirement income as their parents. [7]
We continue to go to parents, colleagues, or friends for financial advice because we don’t trust our banks for complete, impartial advice. This further underlines the need for reliable, safe and controlled financial products
Our goal at Wally is to empower you with accurate, real-time and impartial information. We want to demystify finances to allow you to make educated, informed decisions that are best for you.
The Australian market is seeing a consistent and strong interest from millennials. 82 per cent of Wally’s users are between the ages of 18-35 years, and this significant percentage holds true across the globe.
It is encouraging to see the number of millennials using Wally increasing, sharing with us their financial success stories. We are committed to continue building Wally to cater to millennials so that none of you have to miss that special trip with your friends in the future.
Saeid Hejazi is the CEO and founder of Wally – a personal finance app available on iOS and on Android as Wally+. Download now.
[1]http://www.accenture.com/microsite/everydaybank/Documents/media/Accenture-2014-NA-Consumer-Digita-Banking-Survey-Online.pdf
[2] The Economist: Money-management for millennials
[3] 2014 North America Consumer Digital Banking Survey
[4] 2014 North America Consumer Digital Banking Survey
[5]http://www.accenture.com/microsite/everydaybank/Documents/media/Accenture-2014-NA-Consumer-Digita-Banking-Survey-Online.pdf
[6] http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/1647509ef7e25faaca2568a900154b63?opendocument
[7] http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Press_Office/Docs/whitepaper-generation-game.pdf
[8] http://datatopics.worldbank.org/financialinclusion/country/australia
