Money Dashboard, which is shooting to become the Mint.com for the UK, launched its open beta today. It appeared as a closed Beta in October, which, they say, was “massively over-subscribed”. The site recently completed a funding round, securing £1 million of investment via a consortium of investors.
It also has a lot less competition now that main competitor, Kublax, deadpooled this February.
Like Mint, the point of the site is to allow people to track and analyse their finances by aggregating bank accounts, tagging transactions and using budgeting tools.
As part of the launch, announced at TechCrunch Edinburgh, a number of new features have been released including ‘Ways to Save’ pages. These will, in theory, help monetise the platform by featuring affiliate offers for financial products. Other new features include email alerts to let users know when they are nearing their spending limit in defined categories and to help avoid over draft charges.
Money Dashboard will have a fair wind. Some 75 percent of UK consumers are using online banking, up from 54 percent in 2005 according to the British Banking Association.
It’s worth remembering that the site is in fact powered by the same underlying financial tools provider as Mint, which is Yodlee, a US-based provider of personal finance management and payments solutions. As it’s been pointed out before, Mint was Yodlee’s Youtube in the same way that Youtube was the interface to Flash video which made a lot more than Adobe out of Flash. Yodlee is of course getting paid.
The startup was founded by Gavin Littlejohn in 2006 and includes non-executive chairman Stuart Sinclair, former CEO of Tesco Personal Finance and David Robinson, founder and former CEO of Bright Grey.