How MySpend by TD & Moven Helps People Track Expenses

If there’s one thing most consumers wish they could do better when it comes to managing their finances, it’s keeping tabs on spending. And while various technologies, apps and solutions have hit the market to help banking customers track their spending, one unique partnership is helping people get even more insight into where, when and how much they spend.

As the second largest bank in Canada—and 19^th largest in the world—Toronto-based TD Bank serves over 22 million customers worldwide and over 11 million in Canada alone. And as an international big banking player, TD Bank faces stiff competition from competitors when it comes to offering branded money management and expense tracking technology. More and more, consumers are looking for apps that can help them monitor their expenses in real-time, on-the-go via smartphones and tablets. Bank of America, for instance, incorporated budgeting and expense tracking capabilities into the latest update of its mobile banking application.

Enter Moven, a New York-based fintech company focused on providing mobile capabilities to consumer facing financial services companies. Moven’s current white-label mobile product offerings to banks include a variety of functionality—from credit score monitoring and mobile banking to budgeting and expense tracking. That’s why Moven was a logical partner when TD Bank was searching for a company to help it develop a next-generation mobile expense tracking app. The result of this partnership was MySpend, a mobile, real-time expense tracking and money management app, made available to TD’s Canadian customer base.

The TD MySpend app was released in April of 2016, and quickly shot up to the number one spot in the category of free money management apps in the Canadian app store.

“Within nine months [MySpend] exceeded 850,000 registered users,” says Rizwan Khalfan, TD Banks’ chief digital officer. “[And] we are seeing customers who are using the app reduce their spending by around four to eight percent, with most frequent users seeing the greatest impact.”

MySpend alerts customers in real-time when any spending occurs using a TD Bank product or service, from a cashed check to credit card expenditures. Not only does this help customers keep tabs on their spending, it also serves to address potential fraudulent activity as soon as possible. MySpend also automatically categorizes all transactions, so customers can quickly log into the app and see how much they spent on rent, utilities, entertainment and so on. For a deeper level of insight, Moven built in a feature that compares a customer’s current month’s spending with their average normal spending patterns of prior months.

“I think the most compelling [MySpend] feature is the continual engagement with customers with the notifications,” notes Greg Midtbo, Moven’s chief revenue officer. “Before they even put their card away they get a notification, for example, of how much they spent dining out and how it fits into their monthly budget.”

The partnership with TD is also a great strategic move for Moven, as the firm is able to reach even more consumers with their technology using the white-label partnership model.

“We realized early on that we couldn’t get tens of millions of customers using the app across multiple geographies without partners like TD,” says Brett King, CEO and founder of Moven. “[Partners like TD] bring us real scale and solve one of the biggest problems that fintechs face today, which is recurring revenue growth.”

MySpend also illustrates the trend of banks partnering with fintech players to better utilize the large amount of customer data they possess, to turn back around and help those same customers succeed financially. While massive adoption rates and high app store rankings are great, the most impressive thing about TD and Moven’s partnership is that it’s helping customers save money. People that engage with the MySpend app on a regular basis have been found to spend less money than TD customers who don’t use the app, or use it infrequently.

The success that TD Bank and Moven are seeing with MySpend only increases the likelihood that the partnership will continue to expand. This could mean developing new features and capabilities within the MySpend app—Moven is already established in the mobile payments space—or making MySpend available to its millions of customers in the U.S. and even the U.K.

That’s because for Canadian consumers thus far, it’s been a simple equation—more time on MySpend equals less spending.

This is one of 10 case studies that focus on examples of successful innovation between banks and financial technology companies working in partnership. The participants featured in this article were finalists at the 2017 Best of FinXTech Awards.