Started by Christo Davel, 22Seven is a personal financial management tool that launched in 2012. It grabs all your banking details from your various bank accounts and aggregates them into a single, easy to use online system – enabling you to see where you spend you money in one glance.
At the beginning of 2013 Old Mutual bought the business and late in 2013 they dropped the monthly fee to R25. Now they have dropped it to zero, yip totally free, and so there is absolutely no excuse not to make use of it.
The thinking is that if they can show you that you spend say R800 a month on cappuccinos, or maybe a couple of hundred Rands using other banks’ ATMs, then you’re more likely to firstly be shocked by the number and then actively work to reduce the amount – with their help. In short they want to help you change your spending habits and hence manage your money better so that at the end of the day you spend less and save more.
With a great visual user interface, the system really is simple to use and everybody is going to be shocked about some of the expenses going through their accounts.
When you sign up you have to give the company your banking log in details, and this spooks some people. But 22Seven don’t actually save the login data themselves, they use US firm Yodlee (who haven’t had any security breaches that I could find info on) to mange the security of your log in details. Further with all the major banks using two-factor authentication (via SMS) they can’t actually do anything with only your log in details.
In truth you could just dump all your spending into an excel spread sheet and analyse the data yourself, but we don’t, and 22Seven makes it really easy, heck they even have mobile apps.
So take control of your spending and sign up for a free 22Seven account.
