I wrote recently about a number of platforms that are aiming to make it easier for us to manage our finances in both the short and the long-term.  For instance, Cleo aims to provide customers with a smarter interface with their online bank so that it can help them to query their habits, and even use its AI engine to suggest improvements.

You also have more business minded platforms such as PredictHQ that aims to help companies forecast the future more accurately, whether that’s financially or otherwise.

A new startup, called Pefin, is attempting to use big data to help us make better financial decisions.  The platform, which is currently in beta mode aims to provide cheaper insights than human based alternatives.

The platform uses neural networks to monitor around two million different data points to provide users with data driven insights.  Whereas a service like Mint might focus on budgeting, Pefin is much more of a time based service that allows you to plug in various milestones and explore how much each of these will cost.

Getting started

You begin by creating a profile and connecting up your various financial accounts to it.  You then add in any longer term plans, whether that’s buying a house or having children.

Pefin will then do its magic, taking into account various external factors such as tax, inflation, even different laws and regulations.  It uses this to project 80 years of coming financial behavior, with this updated on the fly by the system.

The system is nice in that it provides a nice and graphic way of highlighting how your behavior now might influence your future financial health.

Suffice to say, nice though this is, it rests on the ability of the AI backend to provide an accurate forecast.  Because it’s powered by an algorithm rather than people, the team believe that by monitoring so many data sources, this will provide a level of accuracy unavailable to human teams.

During the beta stage the platform is free to use, before then rising to around $6 a month for early customers.  It will be an interesting platform to track.