Cutting the Fat From Your Budget, With Trim CEO Thomas Smyth
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Here's your Money Briefing for Thursday, February 17th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. With inflation at 7.5%, trying to create a personal budget is no easy task. But there's a whole field of budgeting apps that promise to help users track their expenses and find ways to cut the fat.
You could say, hey, look, maybe I need to look at where all my money is going and figure out if there are opportunities to save.
So how do these apps work? And what kind of privacy issues come from sharing your personal financial information with them? On today's show, we have a conversation with the CEO of one such app, Trim. That's after the break.
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There are a lot of apps out there that promise to help you with your personal finances, analyzing your spending habits, finding areas to cut back, and making some of the tough decisions for you. One of those apps is Trim. Its CEO, Thomas Smythe, was a guest at the Wall Street Journal's recent Future of Money Forum. He spoke with our personal finance reporter, JJ McCorvey.
How does Trim’s automated system identify subscriptions and recurring charges?
Here are some highlights from their conversation, starting with JJ on the topic of how Trim actually works.
Can you walk us through how it works and what it takes for the app to run efficiently? Is it algorithms? Is it financial experts? Is it a combination of the two?
Yeah, it's largely automated. Then we realized that you actually have a huge amount of value available if you have some people behind the scenes too to help with high touch opportunities like customer service and negotiating bills and so forth. But what we have basically is an automated system that allows users to connect their financial accounts and their financial data see, for example, their recent subscriptions and recurring payments. They can see their bills going out. They can see, hey, it looks like there's not money being taken into a savings account. There should be. And then Trim will say, all right, well, we can set you up with the savings account. We can negotiate that Comcast bill. We can jump in and try to save you money by canceling your old recurring payments that maybe you've forgotten about.
And many more opportunities like this, right? Car insurance and so forth. So we really do see it as a holistic money-saving opportunity that allows people to identify opportunities to find just a few line items here and there in their transaction data where they could be saving and then take advantage of those opportunities.
Well, as you probably know, there's been kind of a fintech explosion over the past few years. So, you know, that includes budgeting apps. And so, you know, in this increasingly crowded field, can you talk about what makes Trim stand out compared to your competitors?
Yeah, well, look, it's been, I think, an increasingly popular space since back in 2015. And as part of Trim's journey, I think you know this, but for our viewers out there, Trim was acquired last year by a large public company called OneMain Financial.
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