Lloyds have dipped their toes into the world of personal finance management (PFM) with the launch of Money Manager, a new free tool for Lloyds account holders.
Here’s a video of it in action:
Money Manager is a free, easy-to-use Internet Banking service that introduces a new way of keeping track of your money across your Lloyds TSB personal current and credit card accounts.
It automatically breaks down your spending into meaningful categories, such as entertainment, food and travel, using easy-to-read graphs that give you a fuller picture of where your money goes.
In essence this is a stripped down version of other PFM tools like Money Dashboard or Mint, but only allows you to track spending on your Lloyds current accounts, credit cards and most savings account, rather than all of your online bank accounts.
Whilst it doesn’t allow you to see all your accounts, it does automatically categorise your spending from as far back as 2 years ago, so it comes with some useful information from day one:
You can also choose your own categories if you wish. There’s also a neat calendar view to show when your money enters and leaves your account:
Whilst it might not give the complete view of your finances that other tools will, I think this is a good first step from Lloyds, and reckon it could be quite popular with its clients.
Lloyds TSB Money Manager will be available to existing Lloyds Internet Banking customers in the near future.