Welcome

Even in 2019, banking can be pretty terrible. It's hard to get excited about the management of your finances, which can often be tedious, so maybe you put it off until the last Sunday of the month where you can sit down and sort everything out. Even worse, perhaps the reality of your finances are so scary that you avoid them entirely, choosing the "ignorance is bliss" approach to financial planning. Regardless of your current feelings towards the process of financial management, over the last few years, hundreds of companies have launched, with the goal of improving aspects of economic health – picking up the mantle from where the large banks and investment institutions left off.

At Astra, we are trying to make savings and transfers of money as simple as possible. We have built a smart app that allows you to connect almost any account you like and then establish triggers transfers between them. You can also partition accounts to save for specific needs - the sort of thing banks should let you do, but don't. As we built Astra over the last three years, we have seen many clever offerings in the fintech space, some in the same category as us and some addressing a different facet of the massive challenge of improving consumer financial health.

Instead of keeping that research and market assessment information to ourselves we thought we would organize it and publish it to as wide an audience as possible with a single goal in mind - create awareness of the great tools being built every day so that you might find an app helpful for managing your finances. Our assessments are honest, and you will see that many of the listed apps have functionality Astra doesn't have and maybe won't ever have. This isn't a "Us" vs. "Them" discussion but rather a reference document that highlights apps that we appreciate, enjoy, or just plain love.

All of us need to manage our finances better. We are here, with a growing list of others, to make the process of financial management effortless, simple, predictable and powerful so that tomorrow can be a more financially sound. Rest easy – better financial tools are here and more are coming.

Sincerely,

Gil Akos + Sam Morgan

Co-founders, Astra