Facilitating the development of innovative, fully-functional and market-ready mobile apps to increase consumers’ access to safe and fairly-priced financial products and services and help them make smarter financial choices
By Preeti Mehta (Director, Doorways to Dreams Fund)
Can a mobile app development competition change the way we manage our money? We think so, and we’re investing $200,000 to make sure of it.
One in four Americans is underserved by financial services. Over 92 million Americans (that’s 2 in 5 people) give their personal finance knowledge a grade of a C, D or F.
Mobile technologies have the potential to bridge these access and knowledge gaps. Smartphones can help consumers gain access to products, information, and tools in a timely, personal, and recurring way, helping them make wise financial choices and offering unprecedented convenience and flexibility.
Use of mobile devices is ubiquitous and growing, especially among younger Americans and those less well served by the mainstream financial services industry. Yet, to date few private or social sector mobile innovations have promoted financial access and financial capability.
We need your ideas, your insights and your mobile app development talents to help Americans make smarter financial choices and change the way they manage their financial lives.
The Financial Capability Development (FinCapDev) Competition is a nationwide competition administered by the Doorways to Dreams Fund (D2D) and the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI). It encourages and facilitates the development of innovative, fully-functional and market-ready mobile apps to increase consumers’ access to safe and fairly-priced financial products and services and help them make smarter financial choices.
FinCapDev is offering up to $10,000 in startup cash to finalist teams (from a total of $100,000 in startup cash) and an additional $100,000 in prizes, including a $50,000 grand prize.
We have partnered with some of the most innovative financial services, technology and design organizations in the world to provide finalist teams with tools to help build the next great personal finance app:
- Free access to evaluation licenses to Yodlee’s Software Development Toolkit
- Access to Braintree Payments’ payment gateway tool
- Eachscape’s DIY drag-and-drop app development environment and
- Access to experts (ie. IDEO, Ideas42, Citi, H&R Block)
Will you build the next great personal finance app?
Finalist apps will be evaluated by a panel of high-profile judges and winners will be selected at a finalist’s
event in June 2013. The FinCapDev Competition is a complementary competition to the U.S. Treasury’s MyMoneyAppUp Challenge which was also administered by D2D and CFSI. Click here for ideas and designs from MyMoneyAppUp.
Proposals to the FinCapDev Competition are due December 10, with an incentive for early completion by December 3, 2012. For more information and to enter the competition, click here. Email info@fincapdev.com if you have questions or need more information.
Women 2.0 readers: How do you imagine improving financial literacy with technology? Let us know in the comments below.
About the guest blogger: Preeti Mehta is Director of Project Incubation for the Doorways to Dreams Fund (D2D). She currently leads the tax time savings work at D2D and the Financial Capability Mobile App Development Competition FinCapDev. Preeti has a particular interest in exploring social and psychological factors that affect peoples’ financial behaviors and is passionate about exploring the use of technology to provide scalable solutions to help people better their financial lives.
