Personal finance apps in the UK: what to look for

"Personal finance app" covers at least four different products that happen to share a category on the App Store. Knowing which one you are downloading saves a lot of disappointment.

• Budgeting apps: they categorise spending and tell you where the money went, strongest on the month you are in.
• Net-worth trackers: they hold the whole balance sheet, including pensions and property, and show the trend, strongest on the decade you are in.
• Comparison tools: they rank products by rate or cost, useful at a decision point, less so day to day.
• Coaching and planning tools: they answer questions about your own figures, only as good as the data behind them.

Plenty of apps span two or three. The useful question is which one it is really built around, because that is the part that will be good.

Open banking connections pull transactions and balances automatically, through a regulated provider, with your consent and no sharing of your banking password. It is convenient, and it is read-only by design.

Manual entry is slower to start and covers more ground: pensions, property and old accounts often cannot be connected at all. For a net-worth picture, a few minutes of typing every month usually beats a connection that only sees your current account.

This is the single most useful thing to check, and it should not be hard to find. The common models are a subscription, referral fees when you open a product through the app, advertising, or selling anonymised data.

None of those is automatically bad. What matters is whether the model can quietly bend what you are shown. If an app earns a fee on products it also ranks, the fair test is whether the ranking rule is published and whether it is the same rule with the fees removed.

• Is the app itself regulated, or is it an information service? Both exist, and they carry different protections.
• Does it hold your money, or only a picture of it? An app that holds nothing is not a bank, and FSCS deposit cover applies to the bank your cash sits in.
• Can you export your data, and delete your account, without emailing anyone?
• Is the education free, or is understanding behind the paywall?
• When it shows a rate, does it say when that rate was checked?

That third-from-last one matters more than it sounds. An app is software, not a deposit-taker: the FSCS deposit limit of £120,000 per person, per firm, applies to the bank holding your cash, and the separate £85,000 investment limit applies to the platform holding your investments.

Notifications, streaks and rewards can make a genuinely useful habit stick. They can also be tuned to make you trade more, spend more or take more risk, which is why the FCA has studied them closely in trading apps.

A fair test: does the app celebrate something you did, or something you bought? A nudge that tells you a fixed rate ends next month is information. A nudge that appears whenever you have not opened the app is pressure.

Blooom is where you keep the picture, and only you see your numbers.