Financielle | helping women take back control of money

Financielle is a Manchester-based app, co-founded by two sisters, which helps women gain control of their personal finances through tools, informative content and a vibrant online community.

We spoke to Laura Pomfret, co-founder of Financielle, about the company's product offering, the benefits of being UK-based and its plans for international expansion.

Holly Holland and Laura Pomfret, co-founders and owners at Financielle

What does your company do?

Financielle is a female-focused finance app. It's designed to help people take back control of their money. We find that personal finance is 90% personal and 10% finance. You have to get the personal element to help someone.

It is a 'freemium' app for people at all different stages of their life. There are a handful of really good free tools and content and there is a premium subscription of about £24 for the year. We have a really useful tool where you can log all your policies and all your renewal dates and it will remind you when to renew. This is important as with car insurance, for example, if you renew one week out, on some occasions you are going to pay 75% more than if you did it six weeks out.

The app is a combination of three things: content, tools and community. The combination of the three keeps you informed with really interesting content, keeps you accountable with your tracking and keeps you motivated with your community.

We felt this was missing with finance. People see finance as a very private thing but actually we're all trying to do similar things: we're all trying to make sure we can budget, we're all trying to steer clear of consumer debt if we can, we all want emergency savings to fall back on.

Manchester has been amazing for the tech side of our business. There is a really cool tech scene in Manchester that works closely with Leeds and Liverpool as well. It is really easy to get help from other founders who are maybe raising Series A or Series B or are expanding out to the US

Tell us about your UK and global operations.

We've been a company for two years and we launched our app a year ago.

We are a team of four females with a great outsourced team that we dial up or dial down according to where we are at. We are based in Manchester and work as a combination of home and office based. 

We are Northern-based but we have strong ties to the City of London. We come down to the City of London as we have stakeholders and informal advisers who are so into what we are doing not just from the gender finance gap side but also from the financial inclusion point of view.”

What are the benefits of being UK based?

Manchester has been amazing for the tech side of our business. There is a really cool tech scene in Manchester that works closely with Leeds and Liverpool as well. The network is quite small and intimate so it is really easy to get help from other founders who are maybe raising Series A or Series B or are expanding out to the US. Manchester has been a great place for day-to-day collaboration.

FinTech North [an open and collaborative platform in the fintech space] is a really good organisation and the council wants to do quite a lot. So we were supported initially with some free office space in a founder hub which has been a godsend. Wages are a little cheaper and rents are a little cheaper than in places like London so you can move a little more quickly with your investment.

For a long time, even though we were not looking for an investment, we were networking and chatting to people. We built up relationships with some really reputable founders. Tech Nation [a national network for tech entrepreneurs] have been wonderful and connected us with people they thought would be helpful. Two of those people have since invested in us. We've also tried to help other founders where possible. When you need something they are there for you.

We built up relationships with some really reputable founders. Tech Nation have been wonderful and connected us with people they thought would be helpful. Two of those people have since invested in us

What are your company's growth ambitions and how does the UK feature in these?

We want to change the state of finances for females in the UK and beyond. We do want to expand internationally. Even now we have users in Italy, Canada and Ireland. We want to start to identify regions that have similar problems to the UK. So we will look at jurisdictions that are fairly wealthy but which also have inherent problems such as consumer debt.

Personally I would love to be able to continue doing this from Manchester. We will do what is right for the business. It is so easy nowadays to open small satellite offices so it would not surprise me if we had something down south given the flexibility of what is available nowadays. But we would like to stay headquartered in Manchester.