Money-management apps offer consumers the opportunity to manage their money more effectively. However, adoption by users has hit or miss at best, as many aren’t that interested in creating personal budgets. Some consumers have a tough time getting into the habit of regularly using these tools, and they subsequently are at risk of losing interest in a particular money-management app.
Level Money, a “digital money meter,” is designed to be a simpler tool for consumers to use that makes habitual adoption easier. As Level co-founder and CEO Jake Fuentes explained in an interview with Market Platform Dynamics CEO Karen Webster, the problem lies in the fact that many people simply don’t budget (Jump To: 1:15).
“Nobody actually wants to budget. We don’t want to spend time managing our money in order to make the smartest spending decisions,” he said.
The relationship between consumers and money has fundamentally changed, Fuentes suggested. While this shift isn’t a negative change, “money is no longer tactile; it’s no longer a physical object,” he pointed out (Jump To: 1:45).
“What we’ve lost is the ability to open our wallets and see how much money we have left. That’s what we’re trying to recreate,” Fuentes continued.
Yet adoption remains a barrier for money-management apps because some consumers simply don’t want to crunch the numbers on their phones. Fuentes told Webster that Level Money aims to create a kind of passive financial management (Jump To: 3:50) that consumers will find simple and easy to get into the habit of using.
“What we want is to eliminate the need for active money management on the part of our users. If we do all of that, they can just open their phones and get a [financial] snapshot of where they are,” he said.
Younger users from the Millennial generation are more apt to adopt money-management tools on their mobile devices, said Fuentes, who took aim at large financial institutions he says fail to address the basic financial problems experienced by their customers. Level Money, he suggested, can fill that gap (Jump To: 7:15).
“We think that one of the biggest problems that other financial institutions don’t solve is primarily helping people make best decisions for them,” Fuentes said.
To learn more about how Level Money takes aim at the central problems of personal money management in the digital age, listen to the full podcast below.
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