Money management app for credit-card-happy Hongkongers launched by city start-up lists all your spending on one screen
Gini app creates a composite bank statement, breaks down spending into categories and issues a warning if you spending too fast. Founders of start-up behind it feel inspired to help people in one of world’s least affordable cities
Have you ever had that sinking feeling when checking your financial position at the end of the month? It’s a situation familiar to many in Hong Kong: as you switch between several credit cards, your outgoings mount up and you cannot keep track of where your earnings have disappeared to.
A new app hopes to change all of that; gini, a start-up founded by two Hong Kong-born entrepreneurs, claims to be the first personal finance app launched in the city. Its beta version was unveiled to the public via Apple’s App Store last week.
Following in the footsteps of other, long-established personal money management apps such as Mint and Monzo, which are widely used in the United States and the UK, the free gini app allows users to see spending on all their bank accounts in one place so they can track spending more easily.
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The simple user interface displays each transaction with an accompanying logo representing what the spending was on. For example, you will be able to see at a glance if you have spent more on, say, utility bills than eating out last month. Users can generate customised pie charts and graphs based on the data.
“Personal finance is key to achieving all your life goals,” says Victor Lang, who co-founded gini with his cousin Raymond Wyand, a former vice-president at Citibank in Hong Kong who gave up his job in 2016 to launch the start-up.
The pair were inspired to create the app by the many financial challenges facing Hongkongers, particularly millennials.
“The reason it’s called gini is because [the Gini coefficient is] a measure of income inequality and Hong Kong has one of the [worst Gini coefficients]. We can’t fix that, but we can give people the tools to deal with this,” says Wyand, 31, who is also chief executive of the company.
