FinTechs
Disclaimer: We have attempted to provide a shortlist of names purely for your convenience. We recommend that you should make your own independent assessment to determine if these products & services meet your needs.
Personal Finance Management
Mint is an automated budgeting and expense tracker that is completely free! Mint allows you to link all of your bank/financial accounts and track them together in one place, and it can automatically set a budget for you to follow.
Cleo is primarily an AI chatbot to interact with users and provide suggestions about their finances. Cleo can connect with the user’s previously established bank account, and Cleo uses humorous phrases and informal chatting, to engage the audience. Cleo also offers many other features of other personal finance tools, and can hence be a powerhouse.
Digit provides an automatic savings and investing tool. Users can optionally create both a Savings Account and an Investing Account with Digit. Digit connects with the user’s bank account and automatically transfers money into the savings account and investment account. Regarding investing, Digit automatically suggests portfolios depending on a user-selected risk-level.
Intuit Quickbooks is the most popular accounting software currently, because it is a powerhouse and the industry-standard. It is quite easy to use too!
Intuit TurboTax is the most popular tax software, and is also considered to be the golden industry standard. Everyone needs to file taxes, and Intuit TurboTax is one of the most efficient ways to do that.
Zopa is an app to help make managing your money stress-free. Keep on top of your loan, credit card or savings, know your credit score and more.
Connect your bank accounts and cards so Plum can provide a complete picture of your spending, all in one app. You can also set up automatic saving and investing, with as little as £1.
Uulala lets you send and receive money for a fraction of the cost, access microcredit offers, pay bills with ease, build credit, and take charge of your financial future.
Revolut aims to be one app for all things money, from easy money management, to travel perks and investments, and letting you send, spend, and save smarter.
Nova uses the same technology as the world’s top banks to forecast your bills, income, budgeted expenses, financial goals, and month-end balance, to name a few.
Truebill empowers you to save more, spend less, see everything, and take back control of your financial life, by helping you manage your spending, budget, keep an eye on your subscriptions, put your savings on autopilot, and more.
Kuda is a mobile/digital Nigerian microfinance bank to help you get the best out of your money without overcharging you. Kuda includes tools for tracking your spending habits, saving more and making the right money moves.
CRED is a credit card bill payment platform that rewards its members for clearing their credit card bills on time. CRED members get access to exclusive rewards and experiences from premier brands upon clearing their credit card bills on CRED.
Loans
Lending Tree is one of the best sources for loans and loan refinancing, as they offer a marketplace of loans from numerous lenders, to help you choose the best one for you. They compare each offer for you so that you can always get the best deal out there! They also do the same with insurance, credit cards, and more.
Zopa is an app to help make managing your money stress-free. Keep on top of your loan, credit card or savings, know your credit score and more.
Uulala lets you send and receive money for a fraction of the cost, access microcredit offers, pay bills with ease, build credit, and take charge of your financial future.
Grameen America is dedicated to helping entrepreneurial women who live in poverty build businesses to enable financial mobility, by providing microloans, financial training, and support to members.
Zidisha incorporates crowdfunding into lending, through microlending – to provide very small loans to borrowers in developing countries. Zidisha focuses on supporting small-scale entrepreneurs, by directly connecting individual lenders with recipients, through its innovative lending platform.
Kiva is very similar to Zidisha, by allowing individuals to directly lend to borrowers, making it easier for both sides: borrowers can more easily get access to financial capital, and lenders can change lives and impact the world/community more efficiently.
Happy Money, previously known as Payoff, provides fixed-rate personal loans to borrowers to pay off credit card debt, by consolidating into one monthly payment with a lower annual percentage rate.
MNT-Halan is digitizing traditional banking and cash-based markets through tech and data driven solutions, targeting the unbanked, by providing loans, digital payment solutions, mobile wallets, and cards.
Jumo has built a smart financial services platform to make finance accessible to everyone, using AI and Machine Learning to build accurate credit scores and targeted financial products for people who don’t have a formal financial identity, collateral or credit record.
Refinancing
Lending Tree is one of the best sources for loans and loan refinancing, as they offer a marketplace of loans from numerous lenders, to help you choose the best one for you. They compare each offer for you so that you can always get the best deal out there! They also do the same with insurance, credit cards, and more.
SoFi offers refinancing for home loans, student loans, and much more. It is one of the largest and leading providers of these loan refinancing, since it often has low rates.
Credit Score and Decisioning
Credit Karma lets you check your credit score, which is essential to know for your financial journey. It is completely free, and lets you check your score without harm whenever you want.
Upstart is a company aiming to revolutionize the way traditional credit scores are derived, by utilizing additional sources of information. This will help more people get approved for loans and access to financial capital.
Zest.ai is another company incorporating additional sources of information/data in the credit score, to help more people get approved for loans and access to financial capital.
Transunion is the final one of the 3 largest credit reporting agencies/credit bureau.
Per the FACT Act, anyone has access to a free credit report annually, by a service from all 3 of the above major credit bureaus.
Zopa is an app to help make managing your money stress-free. Keep on top of your loan, credit card or savings, know your credit score and more.
LenddoEFL aims to help lenders find good borrowers in any market in the world by using alternative data to make better decisions, similar to Upstart and Zest.ai.
Credit Ladder aims to help improve your credit score by reporting rent payments to Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.
Yolt offers an Open Banking API targeted towards Banks, to help them have better insights and thereby be able to make better decisions.
Self is helping individuals build credit by saving, through a Credit Builder Account, whether you don’t have the best credit, or have absolutely no credit history.
Online Checking/Savings Account
Chime is easily one of the most popular online checking/savings account providers. They have no fees, and make it easy to get started. They also offer a direct deposit and automatic savings (such as through Rounding up your purchases and saving the rest automatically).
Greenlight allows minors and young children to realize the value of saving and help them learn financial education, by giving them a savings account (tied to the parent account and upon parent approval, of course) which they can fully use (including investing!), to help them understand the rights and wrongs at a young age, setting them up for success later in life. Nearly 90% of parents who used Greenlight said that it helped their kids learn the value of financial responsibility.
Novo is a simple business banking platform with no hidden fees and no minimum balances targeted for small business owners, but used by organizations of all sizes.
TymeBank, based in South Africa, offers a transactional account, money transfer service, savings account, and educational App with plans to introduce credit cards, unsecured loans, and loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (SME).
Kuda is a mobile/digital Nigerian microfinance bank to help you get the best out of your money without overcharging you. Kuda includes tools for tracking your spending habits, saving more and making the right money moves.
ATM Network
Spare is an ATM-like network to connect the community with access to cash, through a better and easier network than an ATM. They allow individual merchants to register with them as cash withdrawal points, and anyone with the Spare app can use each merchant as an ATM to withdraw cash. It is more convenient and affordable than using a traditional ATM. Fun fact: Spare appeared on Shark Tank!
Prepaid, Debit, and Credit Cards
FamZoo offers prepaid cards and a finance app, specifically targeted for families with kids. Their purpose is to offer kids a real experience handling money with their own prepaid cards, while teaching them the importance and financial education, but it can also be used independently as just a prepaid card.
MaxRewards aims to help users maximize cash back rewards/offers for credit cards. It allows you to see which of your cards will give you the most back at the grocery store, which of your cards is best for gas, etc., and helps you use the best credit card for each of your purchases to help you get the most cash back and rewards, in addition to offering other essential financial tools.
Investing
Acorns allows you to automate your investment account by letting you roundup your purchase and add the excess automatically into your investments. This is great for someone getting started with investing. They also offer robo-advising to help you set up a good investment portfolio.
Digit provides an automatic savings and investing tool. Users can optionally create both a Savings Account and an Investing Account with Digit. Digit connects with the user’s bank account and automatically transfers money into the savings account and investment account. Regarding investing, Digit automatically suggests portfolios depending on a user-selected risk-level.
With the Freetrade app, you can invest in over 6,000 stocks commission-free. They aim to be a transparent and trustworthy investing app for everyone, with a free tier option.
Connect your bank accounts and cards so Plum can provide a complete picture of your spending, all in one app. You can also set up automatic saving and investing, with as little as £1.
Revolut aims to be one app for all things money, from easy money management, to travel perks and investments, and letting you send, spend, and save smarter.
Webull is a stockbroker that features an electronic trading platform, accessible via mobile app and desktop computer, for commission-free trading of stocks, ETFs, and more.
TradingView provides traders and investors with charts and tools to make better investing decisioning, an essential part of being an investor.
Public.com lets you invest in Stocks, ETFs, Crypto, Art, NFTs, Collectibles, and more, and get insights from millions of investors, creators, and analysts.
Social Impact Investing
Adasina provides an ETF that people can invest in. This ETF comprises of companies that are more receptive towards social justice ideologies, namely racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, and climate justice.
Impact Shares provides multiple ETF’s regarding social justice/impact investing, namely one for racial justice, gender equality, and another for sustainability.
CNote offers social impact investing solutions to both individuals and organizations who are interested in impacting the community while also investing for their financial wellbeing.
Starting a Business
If you want to create a business, you will likely need to set up a website on your domain to drive traffic. Namecheap is one of the best platforms to buy a domain name, host your website, set up email addresses, and much more, for one of the lowest prices!
Gandi is another domain registrar which you can use to buy a domain for your business. Gandi also has very competitive prices, similar to Namecheap.
To go live with a website, you also need a server where you can host your website. Digital Ocean provides different types of these servers depending on your needs, for great prices.
After you get a domain name and host your website, you will need a Content Management System (CMS) to make it easier to set up the actual content on the website. WordPress is one of the most popular CMS’s out there, and is completely free and open source!
Alternatively, if you want to simplify the process of setting up your web presence, you can use Wix, which is a practically all-in-one service to very simply use and get started.
Weebly is another all-in-one easy to use service (from Square) to get your website up and running, similar to Wix. Choose whichever works for you.
Many businesses will need compliance solutions, which are often quite expensive, but Termly has you covered, for free! Their suite will help you stay organized and on top of privacy laws throughout the world, and ensure that your business is safe. Compliance is often a pitfall for many companies, but with Termly you will not have to worry.
If your business requires clients to set up appointments/meetings and schedule time-slots, Calendly is one of the best and most popular online calendars and scheduling tools. Calendly can connect with several calendars to ensure you are never double-booked. Calendly has a free plan which is more than enough, although many features are restricted to the paid plans.
If Calendly is not enough, Cal.com offers a few more features and could be a better fit. Check out which one works better for you! Cal.com also has a free plan, if that is all you need!
Hubspot is one of the leading CRM (Customer relationship management) platforms out there, and it helps your business with automated marketing software, sales software, customer service software, operations software, and Content Management System software. Many of these are offered for free, so check it out!
Cloudways offers managed WordPress/Cloud hosting, that piggy backs on the infrastructure of leading platforms, including AWS, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, Vultr, Linode, and more.
ConvertKit helps you connect with your audience and grow your business using email marketing software that’s easy to use so you can spend more time creating.
Sendinblue offers an all-in-one digital marketing platform, including Email, SMS, Facebook, Chat, CRM, and more, to help you grow your business through building stronger customer relationships.
Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service for managing mailing lists and creating email marketing campaigns.
Intuit Quickbooks is the most popular accounting software currently, because it is a powerhouse and the industry-standard. It is quite easy to use too!
Intuit TurboTax is the most popular tax software, and is also considered to be the golden industry standard. Everyone needs to file taxes, and Intuit TurboTax is one of the most efficient ways to do that.
Wagestream offers solutions to help your employees gain necessary financial skills by empowering them through financial wellbeing management – built around pay, proven by data, and backed by charities.
Stripe is a payment processing platform, which brings together everything that’s required to build websites and apps that accept payments and send payouts globally.
Squarespace is a website building and hosting company which allows users to use pre-built website templates and drag-and-drop elements to create and modify webpages. It is great for e-commerce websites.
Shopify offers an e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. It is great if you have a business where you are directly selling products to consumers.
FriendlyScore helps you get bank accounts data in an easy, regulated, and automated way, targeted for businesses.
When you grow your business with several employees/team members, you need to be able to manage payroll and a human capital management software. That is where Paylocity comes in.
Novo is a simple business banking platform with no hidden fees and no minimum balances targeted for small business owners, but used by organizations of all sizes.
We have all heard about Google, and many already use some of Google’s services on a daily basis. Google Workspace is an all-in-one suite of necessary tools intended for businesses and organizations.
Teachable is an LMS (Learning Management System), which is great to use especially if your business/organization includes offering a course to learners around the world.
Ripple Impact helps increase your business’s influence, income, and impact to help make your business succeed, and help you to rebrand, reposition, or reinvent your business.
Gigwage streamlines 1099 e-filings and embeds payroll, allowing you to grow contractor operations effortlessly.
When you register as a supplier, TradeDepot becomes a full-time distributor of your products. They buy and store the inventory, and take care of everything from shipping and pricing to customer service and returns.
Insurance
Gabi lets you compare insurance policies from a variety of insurance companies, and identify the best one for your needs. As always, shopping around is the best way to ensure you get the best deal, which Gabi does on their platform.
Lending Tree is one of the best sources for loans and loan refinancing, as they offer a marketplace of loans from numerous lenders, to help you choose the best one for you. They compare each offer for you so that you can always get the best deal out there! They also do the same with insurance, credit cards, and more.
Lemonade offers renters’ insurance, homeowners’ insurance, car insurance, pet insurance and term life insurance. They take a unique spin on the traditional insurance model, by taking a flat fee, paying claims quicker, and giving back what’s left to causes you care about.
Policybazaar is an Indian insurance aggregator. It provides a digital platform – website and app – where users can compare insurance policies and other financial services from major insurance companies.
Digit Insurance is one of the leading General Insurance companies in India on a mission to Make Insurance Simple for people. Buy/renew Car, Bike, Travel, Health, Shop & Home Insurance Online.
Financial News and Literacy
Finimize is an app with a daily collection of all of the important financial news and opportunities that customers need to know about. This includes investing advice, understanding the workings of numerous large companies, and also more. The content does not contain any financial jargon, to make it easy for people to make well-informed financial decisions.
Wagestream offers solutions to help your employees gain necessary financial skills by empowering them through financial wellbeing management – built around pay, proven by data, and backed by charities.
The Cash Coach offers financial coaching and will help work with you to identify ways you can improve in your financial journey.
Grameen America is dedicated to helping entrepreneurial women who live in poverty build businesses to enable financial mobility, by providing microloans, financial training, and support to members.
Sending Money
Uulala lets you send and receive money for a fraction of the cost, access microcredit offers, pay bills with ease, build credit, and take charge of your financial future.
Revolut aims to be one app for all things money, from easy money management, to travel perks and investments, and letting you send, spend, and save smarter.
Venmo is a digital wallet that makes money easier for everyone from students to small businesses. More than 60 million people use the Venmo app for fast, safe, social payments.
Cash App is a mobile payment service developed by Block (formerly Square), that allows users to transfer money to one another using a mobile-phone app, similar to Venmo. Cash app has 70 million annual transacting users.
OPay is bringing freedom and security to everyone in Nigeria through unmatched mobile money service. Pay bills, transfer and receive money at the best charges in the country.
Wave aims to reinvent mobile money, by letting you deposit, withdraw, and pay bills for free. Send for only 1%. Wave also has several agents throughout Africa who have cash available.
Yoco offers card machines and online payments made simple throughout South Africa, where over 250,000 businesses use it.
Ozow, provides online payment services for small businesses, nonprofits, and NGOs, in South Africa. They also offer Ozapp, a web app that enables customers with a bank account or e-Wallet facility to transact using a QR-code payment.
MNT-Halan is digitizing traditional banking and cash-based markets through tech and data driven solutions, targeting the unbanked, by providing loans, digital payment solutions, mobile wallets, and cards.
Paytm is an Indian mobile payments and financial services company, offering payments services to consumers and merchants, and facilitating commerce for small businesses, and offers loan disbursal services on its platform.
Using PhonePe, users can send and receive money, recharge mobile, DTH, data cards, make utility payments, pay at shops, invest in tax saving funds, liquid Funds, buy insurance, mutual funds, gold and silver.
Razorpay allows you to accept payments from customers, automate payouts to vendors & employees, and never run out of working capital.
Accept payments from any UPI app – PhonePe, PayTM, Google Pay, BHIM and 150+ others with your BharatPe QR. Payments get settled in your bank account.
Pine Labs is an Indian company that provides financing and last-mile retail transaction technology. It provides a merchant platform and makes software for point of sale (PoS) machines.
