3 Banking Apps Shooting Up the Rankings

Mobile money management is no longer the next big thing — it’s the big thing right now. From banking apps for depositing funds and paying bills to payment apps to use at the point of sale to person-to-person payment apps, there’s a lot of ways for customers to take their money mobile.

Here are three iOS apps that showed big gains in number of downloads today.

Bitcoin Ticker
The bitcoin is something of a currency celebre these days. Given the financial instability hanging over much of the world, bitcoins are starting to look like a safe harbor, despite being (or because?) they are virtual and not overseen by any central bank or authority. Instead they are “mined” from bitcoin servers by computers that lend their processing power to solving mathematical puzzles. That’s right, if you set your PC to mining coins, you might receive a small fraction of a bitcoin after a few days’ work from your CPU — never mind the electric bill. Bitcoin Ticker showed the biggest gain in downloads today among apps dedicated to following the rising and falling value of the bitcoin. Users praise it for being “reliable” and  “functional,” but one warns, “If you set alerts be prepared for 200-300 alerts popping up each time BTC hits the alert price.” Bitcoin Ticker was updated April 8, 2013.

Receipts by Wave
The brains at the business software company Wave took a look at small business accounting software in 2010 and found it, well, awful. The Toronto-based company got some investors on board and began churning out a series of lovingly designed small business management apps — Invoicing  Accounting, and Payroll are some others in the app family. There is also an app for personal financial management. All the apps are available for free. The latest creation is Receipts by Wave, which allows business owners to scan receipts with their smartphone or tablet and incorporate the data on them into their bookkeeping software. The company’s sweet spot is very small businesses — nine employees or less.

ScoreMore
ScoreMore launched in December 2012 and received a minor upgrade in March. The rewards-based app from Affinity Solutions uses geolocation to find nearby offers at participating merchant and display them to the user. The offers do not seem to be valuable in and of themselves, as $5 off lunch would be, for example, but rather offer ScoreMore points — 5 points per $1 spent, and similar rates. But it’s not clear from the app’s description what these points do, or how they are redeemed for something that actually has value. It receives three one-star reviews (the lowest that can be given) in the App Store, and similarly low rankings on Google Pay. One user comments, “This app was highly recommended by my bank, for what purpose I have no idea. It is taking up valuable space on my iPhone so I’m deleting it.”

Honorable mention: iBillionaire
iBillionaire is a day-old app (for iOs — the Android version launched last month) that has already gotten some media attention. The app allows users to pit their own (real or imagined) portfolios up against those of prominent billionaires such as Carl Icahn and Warren Buffett. There is certainly value in seeing how the big kids on the block invest, and the idea for the app came from seeing how many billionaires had invested in Apple when the stock was losing value in the fall of 2012. The app is relatively no-frills other than the data aggregation it delivers. Still, it must be pleasant to receive alerts saying, “Your portfolio beat 7 billionaires today!” PandoDaily took a look at the app this morning and deemed it worthy.