EXCLUSIVE: “There’s an App for That!” – Stuart Thomas in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

We asked one informed user of wealth management apps to give us his Top 3. These are tech guru Stuart Thomas’ picks

Once upon a time, there was an app called ‘I am rich’ by German software developer Armin Heinrich. It cost $1,000 and did nothing but display the message ‘I am rich, I deserve it, I am good, healthy and successful’. It’s long since been removed from the app store along with all imitation apps.

Apps that define you as being rich are now in short supply. What are not in short supply are investment and savings apps that promise to make you richer (with the caveat that past performance isn’t a reliable guide to future returns, of course). They offer a modern take on helping you grow your savings and make the most of your money. But how do you pick out the diamonds in the rough, so to speak, and work out what apps are actually going to aid you when it comes to saving and investing?

These three savings and investment apps have helped me make the most out of my money over the past year, starting with perhaps one of the best-known.

Moneybox

Best for: in-person customer advice

Moneybox’s Cash Lifetime ISA (LISA) comes highly recommended by a man who should know – the UK’s most famous money-saving expert, Martin Lewis. It’s one of a comprehensive list of Moneybox savings accounts and investment funds – the latter held within a stocks and shares ISA, stocks and shares LISA or a general investment account (GIA) – alongside pension and mortgage services, making Moneybox a one-stop-shop for squirrelling away money on a regular basis.

Launched in 2016 and confidently predicting it will see a full year’s profit in 2024, Moneybox had more than £5billion in assets under management, as of November 2023. Through its Cash Lifetime ISAs, it has supported more than half a million aspiring first-time buyers to save for their first homes. But what I found most appealing about Moneybox is the human touch.

We’ve all become accustomed to wasting time with a chatbot that sends you in circles until you find the magic combination that gets you through to a real person. Through the Moneybox app, it’s easy to speak to one of Moneybox’s dedicated support advisors – in fact, you can put faces to their names on the website. It’s this high level of human interaction that earns it a gold star from me

Freetrade

Best for: investor forums

For those with an appetite for more risk-driven options to grow a rainy-day fund, Freetrade is an app that allows the masses to invest in stocks and shares at zero commission. Freetrade was in the first tranche of commission-free trading apps that launched in the UK in the late 2010s in the wake of pioneer robo Robinhood’s emergence in the States.

Freetrade brought many of the same features with it – like instant trades, zero commission trading and, my favourite feature, fractional shares. Freetrade makes trading easy to understand, easy to navigate and easy to invest. There are more than 6,000 companies listed and fractional shares give you access to some of the biggest, like booking.com, which would otherwise be out of reach for many. It offers a few other services, too, such as a stocks and shares ISA with complete control over which sticks the ISA contains, along with personal pension options.

“You shouldn’t be using one of these… You should be using them allFINTECHMAGAZINE”

And it recently launched high-yielding, easy-access cash investments as well as British-government-backed Treasury bills – both an attempt to unlock some of the cash on bank deposit, that’s been building up on the back of the best rates in years. But my favourite feature has to be the community element of Freetrade.

You can read posts from users about a particular stock or company, essentially giving each stock its own ‘profile’, which can be a good way to find out if a stock is the right investment for you. Over the past six years, Freetrade has attracted more than 1.4 million users who ‘want to invest, but don’t know how’. Like others in this space, it will be interesting to see how it responds to the arrival of Robinhood, which, on its third attempt, is due to go live in the UK in 2024.

Plum

Best for: money management

This list wouldn’t be complete without looking at the best use of artificial intelligence to help you on your savings and investment journey. And my AI of choice is Plum. Plum describes itself as ‘a budget app, investment app and money saving app, all in one’. It integrates with your bank account and gets to work analysing your habits.

Now, on the one hand, letting some algorithm analyse how many pints I buy at my local Wetherspoons doesn’t sound great, but if you can get past that, then the benefits are impressive. Once Plum has worked out what I can afford to save, it will automatically calculate a figure each week that it thinks I can safely set aside without affecting my daily life, at which point it will draw that figure from my account and stash it in my Plum savings.

And, if you let it work its magic, they can quickly grow, especially if you take advantage of a host of clever features such as Money Maximiser, which keeps money in your savings Pocket (aka pot) for as long as possible (maximising interest), before providing a weekly flow of cash back to your everyday bank account to cover spending; round-ups; and, if you’re struggling to repay debt, a configuration that allows it to use your bank overdraft to save extra money. There’s a high degree of user flexibility, too.

Saving rules can be enabled or disabled individually, and auto-deposits can be set to your financial ‘mood’ at the time with five saving settings from ‘Shy’ (-50 per cent) to ‘Beast Mode’ (+75 per cent).

Premium users get access to additional features, including gamified goal setting. Although not as comprehensive an offer as Freetrade, Plum is an easy way in to investing, too, offering a stocks and shares ISA or a GIA. And that, I think, is the key point here: you shouldn’t be using one of these apps. You should be using them all.

They all excel at different things. Moneybox offers brilliant LISA and ISAs for a tax-free way to gain interest. Freetrade offers more risk, but unparalleled control over your investments in the stock market. And Plum will do all the hard work for you by using algorithms to work out what you can save.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue 31, Page 23-24