Meet REACH, the Startup that Wants to Help You Keep Track of Your Spending Habits and Teach You to Save

As entrepreneurs and employees, we all fear running out of money and having cash flow issues. But, we are not always able to keep track of our cash flows and it is something one can’t afford to ignore.

Monitoring your cash flow is like monitoring your pulse – it’s crucial check for you to get your financial freedom. As such, it is important to understand what your cash flow is and calculate it to keep on top of things.

Fortunately, there are tools out there to help you manage your cash flow more effectively. Using big data and analytics, these tools are able to track your spending and help you get a handle on your finances. One of such solutions is REACH.

Founded in 2016 by JR Kanu, REACH tracks all the income and expenses of users to enable them make intelligent money decisions. Reach provides a visual breakdown of users income as well as where their money goes each week via its mobile app in order to provide them with insights on how to spend or stretch their money.

So users can see which expense(s) takes the bulk of their income or paycheck, and plan towards cutting it or increasing it.

Using an algorithm that works automatically, REACH uses the transaction notification (SMS alerts) users receive from their bank. REACH currently supports 18 of the major banks in Nigeria, so you most likely have your bank supported.

However, users can also manually enter your expenses if it happens that they don’t receive SMS transaction alerts from their bank, and these cash flows are categorised in real time monthly.

REACH also has an AI chatbot assistant, Niki, that helps to answer users questions about how the app works.

Beyond tracking of income and expenses, REACH also has a bunch of cool financial tool for its users, one of which includes its Budgeting tool. With REACH, users can make budgets or personalise financial plan for each of their expense categories based on their income. Recently, the startup also added a savings and investment option to its app for users to save towards a financial goal.

Now, REACH doesn’t only show you how you get and spend your money, it also has a solution to help, should you be caught in a financial fix. It has a loan feature that allow users borrow money at a 5% interest rate monthly through Sterling Bank.

So far, REACH, has had its fair share of traction including being selected for the 4th cohort of the Google launchpad accelerator program. The startup has been also been able to reach over 50,000 people with its personal financial management tool and has disbursed over N30 million worth of loans to users.

Moving ahead, the startup might want to work on creating an iOS app for its solution as it only has an android application for now.