BetterHaves Wins FinCapDev’s $50,000 Grand Prize
BetterHaves, a budgeting tool for couples, has won FinCapDev’s $50,000 grand prize, it was announced last night.
The BetterHaves team, led by Ital Leibowitz, beat out 12 other teams in the competition, which kicked off in October 2012.
Downpayment Saver and Thrifty Bunch were runners-up, each receiving a $20,000 prize. Honorable mentions, which carry prizes of $5,000 each, went to Smart Insurance and Financial Forest.
The apps created for the competition are here. They include Crazy Money, an app for controlling impulse purchases; Financial Forest, an app to help those living on scant resources save money; and Plunk, a social savings tool.
The apps are aimed not at the wealthy or well-heeled, who are inundated by products and services, but rather the many Americans who struggle from day to day and paycheck to paycheck. The competition is described as “a nationwide challenge to develop new mobile apps that will help working Americans make smart financial choices and get better access to financial services.”
The FinCapDev Competition is a joint initiative of the Center for Financial Services Innovation and the D2D Fund and is sponsored by the Ford Foundation, the Citi Foundation, and the Omidyar Network.
Other “friends” of the competition include Facebook, MasterCard Worldwide, Cardfree, PayPerks, Betterment, and Capital One 360, which hosted the event in its San Francisco cafe.
Additionally, several companies provided resources to the competitors. Yodlee offered access to its software development kit; Braintree provided access to its payment gateway; Eachscape gave access to its app development kit; and Deloitte shared access to its Deloitte Analytics Highly Immersive Visual Environment, known as the the HIVE.
Read more about the FinCapDev Competition here.
