French startup Linxo just raised $24 million (€20 million) from three financial institutions — Crédit Agricole, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa and MAIF. The company is building a sort of Mint for the French market.
Banking apps suck in France. Most of them are just a wrapper around a mobile website. It takes them years to adopt new features, such as fingerprint readers, widgets and more.
And many people have more than one bank account. It becomes quite tedious to check your balance and transactions on all your accounts as you have to deal with multiple shitty apps.
Linxo is trying to solve that by building an above average app and service that connects to all your bank accounts. The startup supports dozens of French banks. At first, you need to give Linxo your bank account login information. The company’s servers will then periodically sync past transactions.
This way, you get a good overview of all your bank accounts in one app. You can see past transactions and charts about money you’re spending. It’s a good way to get insights about your financial situation.
But the company plans to go one step further and build a full-fledged financial hub. Its competitor Bankin has already introduced a way to transfer money between accounts in different banks. This feature is currently limited to a handful of banks.
I’m sure Linxo has something similar in mind, as well as ways to save money, get a credit line and buy insurance products. The company has been working on Linxo Connect, a way to sign up to new financial services without leaving the app, using APIs.
With today’s funding round, the startup plans to expand to other European countries. Linxo is also working with French banks to help them with their apps and websites. This could be a lucrative market as well.