While attending an exhausting, snowy yet insightful LeWeb in Paris, the TechCrunch Europe team met with a variety of startups and founders. One of them is a recently launched Slovenian company called Toshl, which gives people a well-designed mobile app to track their day to day expenses.
Both the web interface and the mobile version, which is available for most mobile phones such as iPhone, Android and Symbian, allow you to input all of your expenses manually and sync them in between. In comparison to other startups in the space, however, Toshl has not yet secured any partnerships with banks.
One of Mint’s keys to success has been compatibility with most American banks. By allowing users to link their debit and credit card accounts to their Mint accounts the hassle of manual input is eliminated and, therefore, enabled the service to scale. As one can imagine, Europe still bears an immensely incoherent financial system, aside from the Euro as a united currency. Thus partnering with banks is an incredibly difficult task, and can only be accomplished country by country. Few banks are pan-European and after the financial turmoil getting access to customer data and bank accounts is understandably difficult.
Toshl is currently self-funded and is a spin-off of a well running Web agency in Slovenia. At Le Web, Toshl’s User Interface Lead Matic Bitenc told me that they are in talks with various Slovenian banks and are preparing their mobile roll out for the remaining platforms.
Its success, however, is highly dependent on whether the company manages to break down walls and partner with banks in multiple European countries.