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How big is the market size of personal finance management apps? How many users use personal finance management apps? How big is the banking financial apps and users? Could you also find out the best players in the field and revenue, users, market size? (mint one of them). based on the US. How big is the market size for online receipts?
Hi and thank you for contacting Wonder with a very interesting and complex query. You’ve asked a few questions in one, so for this response I am going to try and cover most of your request, leaving out the market size for online receipts part. I wrote that up as a 'follow-up question' for you but you can also resubmit the query to Wonder as you see fit. Let’s get started.
The 2015 market size of the U.S. personal finance app industry is approximately $24.5 million dollars. The research I conducted for the number of users who use personal finance management apps came up with 12,816,140 users (over age 18). How I arrived at those figures is detailed below. I also added research on the top 3 players in the market - company names gathered from many sources.
For calculating the market size I found a just-released (November, 2015) market research report by Let’s Talk Payments.com. Twenty-one companies were profiled and the report was segmented into four categories: Mobile Banking, Personal Finance, Personal Investing and Wealth Management. Your request fits under the Personal Finance category which includes: “Digital capabilities for tracking spend and income, along with budgeting.”
From the report: “According to the research done in the report, the total investments made in the four categories for years 2013 through 2015 is $681.6 million.” We want to know how much of that total investment was for personal finance apps. And what companies are being included in that total market figure - there are many players in this marketplace.
Twelve companies were included in the analysis for market size of personal finance sector. There are: Learnvest, Mint, Level Money, YNAB, Hello Digit, ACORNS, Even, CashPath Financial, Debitize and Milestone. The market size figure for this niche for 2015 was given as $24.5 million U.S. dollars.
To make sure this company list included all the top players for finance apps and that therefore our market figure would be what you are requesting I did a brief summary of the top five ‘Personal Finance Apps’ in recent articles and cross-checked to make sure the companies were included. The top 5 (listed in all articles as best in class, etc.) are: Mint, Digit, Level Money, Acorn and Quicken.
Quicken was the only company I found on many lists that was not included in the report (in any category) so I needed to research why. Quicken is a product of Intuit.Inc. Intuit is the maker of Mint - one of the most popular personal finance apps on the market. Quicken is more a ‘financial software’ product rather than a ‘personal finance app’ product but does have a mobile app version of its software. So for the purpose of our market size figure, it would not be included as it was not in the above report.
To find information on persons who use personal finance management apps I searched for market or industry reports but found none on this specific topic. I did find a report on mobile phone usage and the percentage of users who use mobile banking servcies. Key data points from the survey (full report in link below) I used are:
1. 87% of U.S. adults have a mobile phone.
2. 39% of adults with both mobile phones and bank accounts reported using mobile banking.
3. 22% of all mobile phone owners reported having made a mobile payment in the 12 months prior to the survey
These stats are not specific to finance management apps (mobile banking includes apps from banks used to make transactions over the phone of course) but the best I could find. There are too many app players in the market to search user stats for each and add them up (over 50 at minimum).
U.S. census data for 2014 reports 318,857,056 people and that 23.1% of this amount is over the age of 18 (an adult). That gives us 73,655,980 adults. Eighty-seven percent (those with mobile phones) of this total gives us 640,80,702 adults with mobile phones. Let's assume a majority of those who bank via phone app will be using personal finance apps. I used 20% (portion of the 39% above) to arrive at my 12,816,140 figure.
For best players in this market information I focused on three top players: Mint, Digit and Level Money.
Mint - was sold to Intuit in 2009 for 170 million. By 2011 it had more than 1.5 million users. I checked Google Play download numbers and it has had 10 million downloads as of today.
Digit - started in 2014 with $2.5 million in seed funding. No user numbers but did find this: "...saving members $1 million per month." Full article below.
Level Money - 500,000k downloads on Google Play. Bought by Capital One in January, 2015. Tech Crunch article states 700,000 users.
Thanks for using Wonder! If you want more in depth information about these companies or mobile banking, please don't hesitate to submit follow-up questions.