Moneytree, a Japan-based start-up founded and headed by Australian serial entrepreneur Paul Chapman, has raised $1.6m in a seed investment round led by Digital Garage’s corporate venturing unit, DG Incubation.
Other private investors that took part in the round included PayPal, MasterCard and Morgan Stanley senior executives. Moneytree will use the funding to expand into markets abroad, particularly in the US starting next year. The app maker is currently working on a web app and its iPad version.
Moneytree is a new app launched in 2013 for the Japan market that can automatically display balances and transactions from Japanese banks and credit cards on your iPhone or iPad. It is now available for download from the App Store. Tokyo-based Moneytree KK has been developing the Moneytree app and supporting cloud service for over a year.
“People feel tracking their finances is a heavy burden. It takes too much time, so people give up soon after starting, and that makes you feel a sense of guilt,” said Chapman, now the representative director of Moneytree KK. “Moneytree is an app that seeks to do the hard work for you after signing up, you just open the app on your device to see bank balances or credit card usage,” he said.
For example, Moneytree tells you when and how much your next credit card payment is, and you can then check if you have sufficient funds to pay. In another useful touch, it can show you when an expected payment has arrived, eliminating the need to visit a bank branch or log into a smartphone ‘unfriendly’ website.
“Even those disciplined enough to track [their finances] still feel the stress of keeping it current. Moneytree relieves the stress of not knowing where you stand,” he said.
According to Chapman, most of the financial data aggregators in Japan are web focused. They are designed for Web 1.0 and are not natively mobile. That is why Moneytree decided to develop an app for mobile use.
Moneytree has been downloaded more than 200,000 times since being featured on the Japanese App Store. Since it would carry data from more than a thousand financial institutions by next year, its aggregate data showed that over 15 million transactions had occurred since launching in April this year.
CEO and co-founder Paul Chapman is a serial entrepreneur who founded e-recruitment SaaS company, cvMail Services Pty Ltd in 2000, which was later acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2007. While working at Tokyo-based professional services firm enWorld (formerly Wall Street Associates), Chapman met Moneytree cofounders Mark Makdad and Ross Sharrott, with whom he started a mobile consulting and app development business, Long Weekend LLC., in 2009. The three saw a great market opportunity in Japan’s personal financial software segment and founded Moneytree in April 2012.
The company’s board of advisers includes Jonathan Epstein, former country manager for Paypal Japan, Douglas W Lorentz, former executive vice president of North Asia for MasterCard (Western Union Japan), Yasuhisa Tsuchihashi, former general manager of Sumitomo Mitsui Finance & Lease and Natasha Mandie, chief executive officer of Mandie Consulting and former Credit Suisse executive.