Designing money futures – MyBudget establishes development centre in Colombo

MyBudget Director David Bohn and CEO Tammy Barton

MyBudget, one of Australia’s leading money management and personal budgeting specialists, set up its IT Development Centre in Colombo last week as a first step in its venture to expand operations across the globe. 

The company, through its services, aims to eliminate financial stress of customers by setting financial goals and providing a pathway to achieve them. Back in Australia, the company employs its systems to pay bills for customers, manage expenses and even contacts anyone calling to enquire on late payments, and supports subscribers to make right decisions with their money. 

Speaking to the Daily FT, My Budget CEO Tammy Barton, said the IT Development Centre in Colombo will develop and deploy next generation technology that would give MyBudget the ability to reinvent the way it works. With this new platform that encompasses a whole new data model, MyBudget would be able to integrate with a multitude of new service providers seamlessly, giving it the ability to expand overseas. 

With new technology, MyBudget could integrate seamlessly with banking systems in new markets, and the company is looking to expand operations to the UK and US initially. Barton added that they could consider a rollout in Sri Lanka as well due to its presence here, but it would focus on the UK at the outset as it has similar issues culturally with money as they do in Australia.  “The main focus is purely on personal budgeting and helping eliminate financial stress and improving financial health, because your life is really impacted by how you manage your finances. We touch on a lot of things like lending, mortgages, home and car loans, so the new technology will give us the ability to look at the way credit assessments are done because we have all this data, we know what exactly clients are doing with their money. So there are a lot of avenues we can enter into once we get the new technology up. We think there is opportunity in the UK to prove the model in another market,” she said. Barton and her team visited Sri Lanka in 2018 and engaged with several stakeholders on setting up operations here whilst also considering other markets. She revealed that the MyBudget team was impressed with the talent pool in Sri Lanka, adding the people are culturally aligned to their values, and accordingly set up the local business this year with support from the BOI. Sri Lanka will house the majority of the MyBudget’s technology team, in addition to a smaller tech unit back in Adelaide. 

The company is about 20% of the way done with its new technology platform and ready for user acceptance testing, and it is hoping to deliver the full platform by the middle of 2020. Barton added that she hopes MyBudget would become a preferred employer in Sri Lanka one day, as it presents an exciting challenge that can change the lives of millions, even billions, of people around the world. 

Joining the discussion was MyBudget Director David Bohn, who said: “Our purpose is to improve the financial health of the world. But none of that is easily pulled together to show what you have done with your money, let alone show what the future is. The technical challenge of that is quite significant, but we live in a time where technology allows us to start solving that problem. Technology can understand and actually change your relationship to money by giving you a different perspective.” 

“Artificial Intelligence allows to start seeing patterns and predict better and better, so as a client you can really start to not have to think about money so much, but perhaps is my life what I want it to be. It is challenging to build, and something you can scale globally so you never run out of money.” 

MyBudget had looked globally for people to develop and deploy the technology it requires – people who can invent the future of money, and Bohn echoed Barton’s view that when they looked to scale it found Sri Lanka presented a high density of talent to suit its purpose and they were extremely pleased to be here.