FinTech News
Clarity Money to Shut Down App This March
In the world of FinTech, being acquired by a larger company or institution can be a blessing as it gives startups greater access to capital and resources they need to continue development. On the other hand, depending on the parent company, such mergers can lead to stagnation or closure. Now, the personal finance platform Clarity Money may be experiencing a bit of the latter scenario as the Goldman Sachs-owned app has announced that it will be shutting down next month.
Earlier this week, in a letter to customers, Clarity Money founder Adam Dell said the app would no longer be available as of March 5th. This news comes nearly three years after the finance aggregation and budgeting platform was purchased by Goldman Sachs. When that acquisition was completed, the app also gave customers the option of upgrading their automated savings accounts to Marcus by Goldman Sachs accounts. Interestingly until January 2020, Marcus didn’t offer its own app.
On that note, while the standalone Clarity Money app will no longer be available, the aforementioned Marcus intends to integrate “the best of Clarity Money” into their year-old mobile platform. The result is Marcus Insights. Using these features, customers will be able to link external accounts in order to view balances and transactions in one place. Additionally, some of Clarity’s top widgets will live-on in Marcus Insights, including one that allows users to quickly see how much they’ve spent at a specific retailer during a certain period of time (e.g. how much was spent on Amazon in the last year). These tools will remain free and using the platform will not require users to open a Marcus bank account.
Writing to Clarity users, Dell alongside Marcus by Goldman Sachs Head of Product Sonali Divilek wrote, “We started Clarity Money in 2016 with the goal of helping consumers make better financial decisions and when we joined the Marcus family in 2018, we knew we were making another big step towards this ambition. Today, we are focusing our people and efforts on a shared mission: to help millions of consumers achieve financial wellbeing by building the best digital banking experience at Marcus.”
While the closure of Clarity Money may be sad for loyal users, it’s good to see that many of the app’s key features are indeed finding a home on their parent company’s platform. That said, it seems unlikely that new customers will flock to Marcus for these features whereas that standalone Clarity app at least served as an entry point for users. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how the Marcus platform and Goldman Sachs’ continued expansion into the consumer market plays out and what other FinTechs they may acquire along the way.
