Tinder for Your Wallet

Christine Devane (mpd² ‘19) and Aren Thompson (mpd² ‘19) are tackling financial avoidance with an innovative budgeting app targeted at the young middle class.

Swipe left for spending, swipe right for saving.

That's the simple premise behind Brightfin, a financial wellness app conceived by Christine Devane (mpd² ‘19) for her Capstone project in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Product Design and Development Management (mpd²) program.

For Devane, Brightfin’s CEO and founder, the journey from classroom concept to award-winning startup has been anything but simple.

“I've had a lot of different jobs, and I've been frustrated in a lot of them,” she said. “I always wanted to do something different and interesting, and the more I thought about it, the more I was like, ‘This is the thing. This is the calling that I've been trying to find for my whole corporate career.’”

Brightfin is billed as the simplest money app in the world. Devane likens it to the dating app Tinder, except instead of swiping to meet someone who catches your eye, users swipe to categorize their personal expenses.

Unlike traditional budgeting apps with an expansive list of categories, Brightfin offers just four: spend, splurge, save, and share. This streamlined approach tackles a problem Devane identified during her time in the mpd² program: financial avoidance.

“People don't know where to start with money. It can be overwhelming, and so people tend to avoid it,” Devane said. “That’s an insight that came straight from mpd².”

Aren Thompson (mpd² ‘19), Brightfin's chief operating officer and Devane's former classmate, was immediately drawn to the concept when he first heard her Capstone presentation six years ago. Both were part-time students during the app’s genesis.

Thompson said he quickly saw the lane Brightfin could fill.

“There's a million budgeting apps out there, but this is still an unsolved problem,” he said. “The problem has gotten harder and all the solutions out there still fail. A lot of people try a budget app and quit because it’s not solving the fundamental problem.”

The pair, along with third co-founder Richard Shepherd, launched Brightfin on the Apple app store about one year ago to solve that problem by making budgeting easy and intuitive.

Their target market? The young middle class – a demographic they feel is often overlooked by existing financial products.

“That's 55 million households,” Devane said. “For your average middle-class person who isn't deeply in debt and also not ready for expensive financial advisory services, what are they supposed to do?”

The two mpd² grads want Brightfin to be the answer.

Their laser focus on understanding their customer base is a direct result of lessons learned in the mpd² program.

"The program has a terrific grounding in focusing on your customer,” Devane said. “Understanding your customer better than anybody else is the way to win."

Thompson agrees with Devane’s take on mpd². He said nearly every aspect of his mpd² education has proven valuable in building Brightfin – from plotting the user journey to finding meaningful feedback and building useful business models.

The startup’s innovative approach has already garnered recognition, winning a Best Mobile App Award and a FinTech Breakthrough Award. It also was named a finalist for the Webby Awards.

For Devane and Thompson, the real measure of success lies in helping young adults navigate their financial futures.

“We think of ourselves as financial wellness. It’s not only treating the symptoms of 'I ran out of money by the end of the month,' but more so how you feel about that,” Thompson said. “If people aren't confident with their own finances, it doesn't matter how many pretty graphs and auto-categories you have. You still feel bad at the end of the month.”

As Brightfin continues to grow, Devane and Thompson remain committed to the principles they learned at Northwestern.

"The mpd² program gave us an extreme and necessary focus on how to be successful,” Devane said. “It was a terrific education. By no means was it easy, but there was ample help and it touched on a lot of different areas that have proven useful in my career already.”