MyCash, a new start-up from Latvia, has launched a service that helps manage personal finances. Setting financial goals and budgets, receiving timely alerts on bills, finding savings and seeing your spending all in one secure place. Sounds familiar? No wonder - that's exactly what Mint does in US and Canada. Latvian MyCash is not as comprehensive a servivce as Mint, but it's clearly trying to get there. Unlike Mint that directly monitors your bank accounts, you'd have to put every spending and income manually into MyCash. The interface is not as smooth as Mint's but it does not have any obvious flows either: it's clean and simple. MyCash is only available in Latvia, in Latvian and Russian languages only.

Who exactly founded and runs MyCash is not publicized - there is no mention of founders behind the service anywhere on the website or on the company blog. It is also not clear how the company is going to make money - the service is currently free and there are no disclosures of service charges from bank transactions. While the idea behind MyCash is not new, the service itself has not been offerred in the region. However, having a competitor like Mint cannot be easy: with more than 1.4M registered users and $30 million in funding since its launch three years ago, Mint is a giant compared to MyCash. Getting that type of funding or that large a userbase in Europe is harder than in the US. Banking and finance regulations differ from country to country and not all even have online banking. Coming from a country with a population slightly bigger than 2M, MyCash needs to spread the service to other countries as soon as possible before other copycats emerge or before Mint comes to Europe. The race for tracking European's personal finances begins!

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Tuomas Toivonen December 15, 2010

Despite some encouraging progress on the pan-European level, financial services (esp. for consumers) are still essentially segregated into national markets. There is certainly an opportunity for localized "Mint clones" - and not only linguistic localization but more importantly bank feeds.

There was an interesting post [1] by Marc Hedlund, one of the founders of Wesabe, on why Mint won and they failed. Essentially Mint was able to give their users very instant gratification. You register, give them (or rather, their feed aggregator partner) your online banking credentials and, voila!, Mint is able to give you automagically an interesting and even useful picture of your personal finances.

Unless you're able to deliver this instant gratification, I don't think there is enough perceived value. If you need to enter data manually and can't import transaction history, it just takes too long to build up enough data to provide interesting insights.

So, to work, any personal finance solution absolutely needs to provide automated bank feeds. And that's not easy. But then again, eg Balancion in Finland having built said bank feeds has a pretty convincing advantage over potential competitors. (Well, unless you consider the banks themselves as they obviously already have all the data... for single bank consumers.)

[1] http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint