Kublax, effectively a UK version of Mint in the US, launches its financial aggregation engine officially in the UK on Wednesday (tomorrow). Meantime it has appointed a new CEO and I understand that it has received yet another additional financing round of “just under” 1 million euro – clearly its backers are convinced of the model as Kublax has been in development for two years now. The Kublax launch is well timed for the recession as the imperative for consumers needing to keep on top of finances looms large. Some 55% of the UK population is already banking online, so there is a ready-made market.
The new CEO is Tom Symonds, a former BSkyB Director of Internet products. Kublax is the brainchild of Sridhar Sethuraman, a former IT and management consultant.
The new funds raised this year have come from Ambient Sound Investments and individuals such as Stefan Glänzer, former executive chairman of Last.fm and Jonty Kelt, Vice President of Search, International with DoubleClick. Previous investors which have also participated in this latest round are The Accelerator Group (TAG) (a Seedcamp backer), Omnis Mundi Invest AG and Digitalents Capital. In February 2008 Kublax won a further round of undisclosed angel investment from those latter three, together with Five Ventures.
Here’s how it works: Using Bank-level security, Kublax pulls together all your bank, building society accounts and credit card accounts and puts each line of income and expenditure into flexible categories. This is then displayed visually to make it easier to see how your money is working – or not. You can thus monitor cash flow at a glance. Calendar and Alert features can be used to trigger events. But the killer feature is showing you where you are paying over the odds relative to other users like you. In fact it uses the same security systems currently used by the US Federal Reserve.
Kublax was a winner of Seedcamp way back in 2007 and its nice to see it’s got this far. Although technically a competitor to Mint, Kublax’s business is relatively safe since banking is so regional across the planet. It’s been in working beta since September last year.
The “join kublax” link gives a 404. As does the login page.
Going to https://www.kublax.com/ gives a red hat page.
I got an SSL error.
I’m all for awesome early stage stuff – but when its my online *bank* stuff, it’s important to re-assure consumers that you know your shit. (I’m sure they do, but brand identity is so vital when it comes to money … )
Please forgive the SSL error (which means no new users can register nor can our beta test users access their accounts at the moment), but the reason is that the alternative would be worse, ie, no SSL cert and therefore unsecured data/transmission.
As Mike kindly mentioned, the launch is planned for tomorrow (Wednesday), and in preparation we’re updating all of our SSL certs tonight … but that may take just a bit longer into the evening. In the meantime, we don’t want to take any chances and hope our beta test users will be understanding that we’re locking everyone (new and old) out of the db to ensure there is absolutely no chance of any unauthorised access.
We’re pushing hard to get everything lined up for tomorrow (obviously wouldn’t settle for anything less than SSL), so please come back and check it out then!
Great to see another Seedcamp team going forward with the plan!
I wish them luck!
[and to fix early issues before tomorrow's launch]
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
Please forgive the SSL error (which means no new users can register nor can our beta test users access their accounts at the moment), but the reason is that the alternative would be worse, ie, no SSL cert and therefore unsecured data/transmission.
As Mike mentioned, the launch is planned for tomorrow (Wednesday), and in preparation we’re updating all of our SSL certs tonight … but that may take just a bit longer into the evening. In the meantime, we don’t want to take any chances and hope our beta test users will appreciate, even with potential inconvenience, that we’re locking everyone (new and old) out of the db to ensure there is absolutely no chance of any unauthorised access.
We’re pushing hard to get everything lined up for tomorrow, so please come back and check it out then!
Nice! I can’t wait to check this out!
Good timing…let’s see how Kublax stacks up against Mint or Wesabe. Do they have an Iphone app yet?
Mike: let’s not forget that Kublax is also the brainchild of Alain Revah who is a well known Internet entrepreneur and investor (at least here in the US)
Great to see the start of a UK version of Mint. This does appear to be an early beta however, lots of things don’t work – in particular trying an Amex credit card, transfers to pay of the balance seem to appear as “income” and the amount owed appears to get added to the balance (what a nice world that would be!)
I am sure they will get a lot of these issues fixed; for now I’ll stick with Egg’s money manager for account reconciliation – but will be great when this is completly up and running.
Does anyone know what service they are using to connect to the banks data systems? Yodlee like Mint?
Unfortunate that the sites down on launch day!
It’s an important area. Unfortunately, banks’ use of PINSentry authentication has scuppered automatic account reconciliation.
It’s an important area. Unfortunately, banks use of PINSentry authentication has scuppered automatic account reconciliation.
Robert,
My understanding is some banks let you get around this for “view” only. Barclays certainly lets you do this, unless you have a business account attached in which case they don’t. My nationwide account has a pin-sentry type device but I don’t believe I have yet been asked to use it.
I signed up for Kublax at the beginning of the year and had started to think they were winding things up – it’s a really valuable service so I’m not only pleased that they’re still going, but also that the site has had a good overhaul.
The ongoing “when will Mint come to the UK?” saga shows no signs of being answered soon, and I suspect they’ll really benefit from the substantial injection of cash – it’s not the type of thing you can really do on a shoestring budget, and they now have the opportunity to get up to speed.
One to watch. I just hope they nail the execution.
Looks like a great service – though I saw that apparently the T&Cs require you to raise any disputes in Californian courts! That looks pretty dodgy to me…
Hey Mike et.all
pls do check out ‘more competitions’ in this space, check out Unience from Madrid, Spain
http://www.unience.com/
Mike, sent you an intro their founder already.
keen to see other’s comments/insight.
BR
@GarethWong
First of all, congratulations to Kublax for their launching. I hope it goes well. The better it goes for anyone in this space the more relevant it will be for all of us.
Unience is social network of investors that share information and knowledge about their real investments. If you want to see the type of info that people are sharing at Unience, see my public portfolio here:
https://www.unience.com/portfolio/profile/TuldorRV+00031fd84e0011ace9ae0d06e0a582f01211aaffea6
All the best!
Nicolas Oriol
Congratulations to Sridhar and the Kublax team. It’s been a long time coming, site looks great.
Best,
Justin (Xelector)
First impressions last and this looks terrible and very amateurish, Well after 2 years and all they could come up with is this :-0
They need to sack their design team and start from scratch,it looks like it was knocked up in 2 weeks never mind 2 years……….
I hope it works for you guys but to be honest i don’t think it will unless there are some drastic improvements made and a good clear out made.
I agree. kublax promises so much but delivery is really poor. I tried to get my accounts added, and it failed on both barclays and egg… as if to say, who the hell are these banks anyway ?
come on guys…
sort yourself out.
i for one will not be trusting my bank details just yet.
Unfortunately, having used this site for a couple of days, I didn’t find the experience compelling at all. They might have a cool visual design, but the information architecture does not lend itself to the tasks wanting to be completed by the user.
Execution flawed – they better get there arses in gear as if Mint do somehow make it to UK shores within the next 6-12 months, it will steamroll this product.
Best of luck!