Empowering personal
finance in Japan with
mobile banking solutions

Overview

Moneytree is building an ecosystem where everyone can turn data into power through a secure and trusted platform rooted in privacy by design. Founded in 2012, they offer a suite of applications that includes a personal finance app, enterprise accounting and a cloud data aggregation platform. 

The first start-up to receive funding from Japan’s three largest banks, Moneytree’s app has twice been voted Apple’s ‘App of the Year’.

Idea

Moneytree’s mission is to unlock the power of data for good. With over 5.5M users, their PFM app harnesses secure APIs to collect information from credit cards, bank accounts, loyalty programs and securities to display consolidated insights about financial health.

At the provider level, Moneytree’s financial data platform – Moneytree LINK – aggregates account data for more than 2,500 financial institutions. 

With more than ¥2.6B in venture capital funding, Moneytree’s priorities are accelerating their product line, deepening their ecosystem capabilities and staying ahead of the competition. So they connected with Star to support the development of two new breakthrough mobile banking solutions. 

Project

While Asia is known for leading in digital payments, Japan had been a rare holdout. Even as late as 2019, cash accounted for 73.3% of the overall payment volume. Since Covid-19, that’s rapidly changed as more consumers embrace cashless options. As a result, many Japanese banks are trying to catch up with nimble new entrants. They face an urgent need to digitally transform to create flexible payment methods, improve operational efficiencies and capitalize on new revenue streams. 

To move faster, banks have increasingly turned to partnerships with agile start-ups. With its industry-leading AI-based financial infrastructure platform, Moneytree was an obvious choice for Japan’s leading bank. They strategically invested in Moneytree to help them build a financial platform for saving, investing, and managing accounts and credit cards. Around the same time, another of Japan’s largest banks cemented a deal with Moneytree to build a PFM app.

In short, Moneytree had two back-to-back world-class opportunities and they needed a partner who could help them scale up quickly and deliver. That’s where we came in. 

Leveraging Star’s expertise in the banking sector, Moneytree harnessed our teams to help them fast-track the delivery of two new FinTech solutions focused on the needs of Japanese consumers at a mass scale. 

With both FinTech products, our global reach, security expertise, project management and mobile engineering were critical to ensuring successful and on-time delivery. We helped everybody see eye to eye and focus attention on what matters most – the product. 

Together, we helped craft two user-centric PFM platforms tailor-made to support Japanese consumers and the digital transformation of banking and financial services in the country. One of which is already on the market and a winner of the 2022 Good Design Award. It’s already been downloaded several hundred thousand times in the Apple App Store and Google Play. In particular, the platform has been lauded for its ease of use and how it encourages users to facilitate positive changes that improve their financial well-being. 

Testimonial

"Moneytree's professional services division helps our clients build value on top of our Moneytree LINK platform – via consulting, product design or product development. Star thinks about outcomes and business value – not simply software and product development. Coupled with their technical proficiency, this 'applied' capability makes Star an ideological fit for Moneytree's business approach, and we look forward to finding more ways of working together to reinvent what's possible in Japanese financial services."

Mark Makdad

Chief of Platform and Founder, Moneytree

Project scope