South African startup FinWise is a personal finance management website – and soon to be mobile app – that helps people improve the way they work with, and manage, their personal finances.
FinWise was founded by husband-and-wife team Jason Russell and Nicol Vojacek, both professional software engineers, in March 2023 in Cape Town, and has developed a collection of different tools and features, including budgeting, net-worth tracking, financial projections, investment tracking, reporting, and spending insights.
“Our mission is to help people make smarter decisions with their money by giving them the right tools and information they need, that is both simple and easy to use, but still very powerful and useful. We want to help people not have to worry about their personal finances, so that they can focus on things that are more important to them,” Russell told Disrupt Africa.
“We’ve both independently been very interested in the personal finance space for many years, and having realised how little people know about things like budgeting, investing, tax, retirement, and savings, it has always been something that has been close to our heart that we’ve wanted to help others with.”
Though 22Seven is a big competitor, as well as banks that have their own budgeting and finance tools, Russell said there is no compelling competition in South Africa that people “really love to use to help them with budgeting and their personal finances”.
“We want to be the product which people absolutely love to use. Our long-term goal is to be the most useful, compelling and helpful personal finance app in the world,” he said.
Bootstrapped to date, FinWise has just crossed over US$420 MRR, and is growing organically at about 33 per cent month-on-month at the moment.
“We are just about to embark on trying to raise to try accelerate our growth and traction now,” said Russell.
“We are currently operating in South Africa, the US, and Canada. We have plans to eventually expand into Europe, Australia and New Zealand too.”
