Nadine Higgins

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Always do your research or talk to a qualified advisor before making decisions about your finances.

Kia ora, I'm Nadine Higgins and welcome to The Prosperity Project.

There are heaps of apps that help you track your spending and manage your investments, and they are rapidly evolving.

Soon you could effectively have a financial advisor in your pocket.

To fill us in on what's currently on offer and what's coming, we're joined by the co-founder of Akahu, Josh Daniel.

Akahu is the country's leading open finance intermediary.

Josh, and welcome to the Prosperity Project.

I think we should probably start with a little explainer about what a Kahu is and what your role is when it comes to financial tracking apps.

Okay, so you're the link in the chain that takes my financial tracking app and my bank and brings them together so that I can get the data from one into the other.

Okay, and you're doing that for lots of the financial tracking apps, and so that makes you uniquely placed to give us the juice on what some of them are doing.

I guess at their most basic, Josh, they're helping me figure out where my money's going, right?

What else can they do at the moment?

So that's like this chunk is going on the rent or the mortgage, this chunk's going on my fixed bills, and here's what I spent at the pub over the past month.

The Marie Kondo method, is it still sparking joy?

Yeah.

And it sort of sounds like something that's going to tell me to stop doing things that I like doing.

So they can tell you how you have been spending, but do they give any recommendations as to how you might improve that given that you probably want to make it better?

That's the bit that I'm excited about because in the past when I've used tracking apps I had to go in there every week except I didn't and so I'd leave it for three months and then there'd be 457 uncategorized transactions and you'd have to be like oh my god what category was that in and that trip to Bunnings was that something for the garden and something for the house and what does it go under so you're telling me I don't have to do that anymore.

But it's taking some of the hard work out of it and becoming more intuitive.