Germany’s fintech scene is gaining momentum: PayPal joins Finanzguru. The US payment giant is investing 13 million euros in the German company through its venture capital subsidiary Paypal Ventures. The start-up magazine “Gründerszene” first reported on the deal. Finanzguru was founded in 2015 by twins Alexander and Benjamin Michel. The idea behind it: A kind of digital household book that bundles several bank accounts. Following PayPal’s entry, the company is reportedly being valued at between €70m and €80m. But what added value does the financial guru provide its users? WiWo editor Niklas Hoyer tested it.
At the end of the month, who hasn’t wondered where all the money went? Especially now, with high inflation. The Finanzguru app wants to bring me much closer to the answer. Can you really do it? A self-experiment should provide the answer.
After I have given the app access to my account and securities account bookings, it evaluates them. In the plus version (seven days free trial, then 2.99 euros per month) it also looks into the past indefinitely, as far as data is available. With my direct bank, I can at least view bookings from twelve months.
Highly sensitive data: adequately protected?
Giving an app access to my payment data is a certain hurdle for me. After all, many transactions provide a fairly precise insight into my behavior: Where was I? What was I doing there? But Finanzguru reassures me: data protection should meet the highest standards, according to the same specifications as credit card providers and banks. My data should only be stored in Germany and no third party should have access to it as long as I do not give my active consent.
Of course, I can also query the bookings online directly from my bank. But Finanzguru brings order: The app recognizes contractual relationships with regular expenses and even uses them to forecast future payments. That’s part of the business model, because that’s how I’m supposed to be informed about cheaper contracts. When changing, financial guru could earn a commission.
The food contribution becomes a donation
When it comes to insurance, the app asks me about my personal circumstances and then shows me whether I have all the policies that are essential for me. The whole thing is well done. In return for a brokerage order, Finanzguru would ask the providers about the conditions of my policies and then submit alternatives to me. This would be via the broker pool Jung DMS & Cie. run; at Finanzguru itself, Deutsche Bank is on board as an investor and partner – and now PayPal too. For the time being, however, the analyzes are sufficient for my own purposes.
The app also sorts income and expenses into categories as if by magic: supermarket, clothing or gym, for example. I get a list of all my contracts and their running costs, depending on the payment interval. If the contribution of a contract increases, the app points this out. It even recognizes dividend payments from stock corporations or ongoing savings plans. Very seldom do I make mistakes. The lunch fee for my child of primary school age is collected by Caritas. However, it is not a “donation”. But I can correct that quickly.
Six percent for vacation and travel
I’m always pleasantly surprised. So I can even read out my user account with the payment service provider PayPal with Finanzguru. It doesn’t seem to be fully developed yet, so a “beta” status is displayed here – apparently the app is still fine-tuning the data connection. But in the self-experiment this also worked well. Finanzguru also recognizes when, for example, purchases have been paid for by credit card or PayPal and are then later settled from the checking account. The app excludes such rebookings in the analyses, so it only counts them once, not twice.
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As a result, I can track month by month how much I spend in which categories: 37 percent on average for rent and household, almost six percent for vacation and travel. I suddenly feel very oriented, without an annoying household book. My consumer spending is shown as a bar chart: a stable uptrend. Hm. That must be this inflation. I can even follow the performance of my portfolio; my bank does not have this service. The chart is currently trending in the opposite direction to my consumer spending. But that doesn’t really surprise me at the moment.
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I canceled the paid Plus service after the trial period. The free analyzes are enough for me. I was also able to export all evaluations as an Excel file during the trial period. If you want, you can save the past data and then have access to it later. Should I want to go deeper into the analysis and need more access, I could reactivate the plus option.
Help with the tax return?
Some expansion stages are obvious at Finanzguru. For example, the tax return could be filled with the data evaluated by the financial guru as if by magic: insurance contributions, professional expenses, other income. In combination with the automatically retrievable data from the income tax statement, not much rework would be necessary. It is similar, for example, with the app Finanzblick from Buhl-Verlag, which is connected to the tax software Wiso Steuer. But that’s still music of the future. It is true that users of Finanzguru have already expressed a corresponding idea in the company’s own forum. But the team behind the app has so far considered it technically difficult to implement.
Perhaps the last word has not yet been spoken here. The founders of Finanzguru, including the twins Benjamin and Alexander Michel, certainly have ambitions. Her appearance on the TV show “Die Höhle der Löwen” in 2018 also made her famous. Carsten Maschmeyer invested one million euros. Today, more than 500,000 registered users show that the financial guru is apparently filling a gap. The challenge will only be to bind users really firmly to the app. To do this, it must constantly offer added value. My conclusion of the self-experiment: The app brings order to the finances, especially with current expenses. Users gain an overview of their contracts and their costs. This is how they can they recognize potential savings, which is a real help for me.
Transparency notice: This article first appeared in September 2022. It was editorially updated on April 4, 2023 in the course of current developments.
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