Gary actually built Money Manager for his own use. He was tired of wasting time logging into bank accounts, downloading statements to Excel, trying to figure out what was going on. So he built a tool that did all of that automatically. The idea was always that it should be as easy to pull in bank statement data from various banks / accounts; categories those transactions (automatically where possible); view meaningful, useful graphs; do invoicing, and track which invoices had / hadn’t been settled – as it was to use email.

So that’s what Gary built, and it worked really well. He made the tool available on his blog and it rapidly went viral, and Nedbank and another major South African bank approached him and asked if they could license the tool for their clients. Gary ultimately signed with Nedbank, who made it available to all of their retail and small business clients.

Over the years we continued to enhance the product, based on feedback and requests from tens of thousands of users. The product received significant accolades from the press, Microsoft, and most importantly – our users.

There were many difficult parts to this puzzle.

First, when we built the original version (before we licensed it to Nedbank) we wanted to be able to login to all of the major banks in South Africa, and download all of their bank statements into a unified file format – automatically and without any user intervention whatsoever. We did that without any assistance from the banks, by coming up with some really clever automation and screen-scraping, using numerous technologies to get this all working without any user intervention whatsoever. In order for Gary to build all of that he needed bank accounts with all of the major banks to test on – some of these were his own, but many of them belonged to our users, who simply trusted us with their PIN / Password / Profile information in order to build and test the automation processes against live data.

That sense of trust and incredible community was how Money Manager was formed, evolved, and continued to thrive until it because the largest Personal Financial Management (PFM) tool in South Africa, and eventually got the attention of Microsoft who contacted us from their head office in Washington and asked to interview us for what we had managed to build.

The bank statement automation piece was just the beginning though. Automatically classifying transactions using what today would be called “machine learning” (although that wasn’t yet a buzzword when we built all of this) was another big piece of the puzzle. We did this by effectively building a machine learning layer / engine, which processed millions of transactions based on how actual users manually classified them – again, all with the help of our community. By the time Nedbank launched Money Manager to their clients we were already able to classify over 80% of transactions automatically and correctly (two different things). Within 18 months of Nedbank launching Money Manager to their clients that number went up to 96%.

Once we had those two important pieces in place (getting and classifying the data correctly and automatically), we then built all of the magic on top of that.

We’ve actually been wondering this ourselves for some time now.

A few years ago Nedbank gradually phased out Money Manager, as they decided to build PFM-type functionality directly into their Internet Banking platform. We considered trying to support the product ourselves, without the Nedbank partnership, but we have always been better as a “pure tech company”, and not a marketing / support / help desk / all-of-that company.

We’ve often considered looking for a new partner for the product. It could also reasonably easily be expanded to support foreign banks.

If you happen to work for a bank, or another organization that might be able to roll this tool out to your client base, and would like to have this discussion with us, please get in touch.