Financial management app Lista wants to help Filipinos save amid inflation

MANILA, Philippines — In the process of building their app, Aaron Villegas and Khriztina Lim believed Filipinos needed to move past pen and paper to balance their finances.

In an interview with Philstar.com, Villegas and Lim, founders of nascent financial management app Lista, said the idea was borne out of the sari-sari store experience of Villegas’ family.

“Aaron’s family has sari-sari stores. The stores weren’t growing, every month it was the same income haul. They were using pen and paper to track business performance,” Lim said.

Lista recently reported 1.4 million downloads around the country.

Villegas conceptualized the idea for Lista after Brian Cu introduced him to Lim. Cu is a former country head for the Philippines of hugely popular ride-hailing superapp Grab, where Lim works as a senior regional marketing manager.

Cu, one of the founders of grocery platform SariSuki, thought it best that the two should talk, since Lim was keen on entering the financial technology space.

The app was launched in September last year.

As it is, the app sought to “enlighten” Filipinos on financial management and planning, since the founders believe tools available in app stores were either too complex or weren’t tailor-made for Filipinos. According to the founders, users of the app include market vendors, stay-at-home moms, and young adults who want keep track of expenses.

Lista’s founders noted that an interview of 100 people revealed that most of the app’s users used pen and paper, excel sheets, or didn’t use anything to track their finances.

“Coming from Grab, I’ve always been studying why Grab drivers were having difficulties with their income. Why weren’t the incentives enough?” Lim said.

Lim noted she had “very few inputs” since “Aaron had ideas for the app already.”

From MSMEs to consumers

Lista’s rise in the local startup scene seems to be a confluence of factors. The app has already raked in $5.8 million or P366 million this year during its Series-A fundraising activity.

The app counts noodle giant Monde Nissin as one of its investors. It’s also backed by a number of investment giants, such as Singapore-based venture capital firm Openspace Ventures which has backed a number of startup success stories, including Gojek and Kumu.

Lista’s founders were proud that they are the first and only East Ventures-backed startup in the country. East Ventures is an Indonesian venture capital firm, which invested in Tokopedia early on its infancy.

“When they invested, it was such a big deal because that meant they were starting to look for more startups locally,” Villegas said.

Lista was initially targeted towards servicing medium, small, and micro-enterprises. But the market offered a bag of opportunities, especially if Filipino consumers are concerned.

According to Lim, their team mounted focus group discussions and discovered that many lamented the absence personal features in many financial management apps. That was the time Lista launched a budgeting feature.

Coincidentally, the app saw an opportunity when inflation started going haywire nationwide. Lista’s data revealed that personal users ballooned to 52% month-on-month in July from a measly 30% rate in the previous month.

By then, the prices of consumers goods and services quickened to 6.4% on annual basis.

Lista’s personal users grew by 60% month-on-month by October as the app’s use seemingly kept pace with painful inflation.

According to the startup, 100,000 users bought into their “savings challenge” to meet certain financial goals. User data mined from the app found that, on average, personal users are looking to buy themselves pricey gifts during the upcoming holiday season.

Businesses and firms would find it interesting that Lista’s personal users are eyeing to buy motorcycles (P54,000), a new smartphone (P25,000), to travel somewhere (P23,000), or to spend (P17,000) and buy gifts (P16,500) during the season.

“We don’t wish that the inflation rate keeps rising, but it goes naturally, because people are looking for apps they could use organically,” Villegas said. “You want to squeeze a little bit more money by the end of the month.”

Cashing in

The app still has a lot of room to grow, since Lista remains free on app store. The startup has yet to monetize the use of its app, but the founders are increasingly bullish on their platform’s potential. The app is looking to introduce personal budgeting within its platform as well.

Lim said that they would start with a “basic” framework for its users. This is the “70-20-10” method.

A majority would go into expenses, while 20% will go to savings and emergencies, with the 10% to be spent on wants such as spending on recreation.

As it is, startups possess a finicky nature. Lim said she hopes that by the first or second quarter of 2023, the company would have launched different experiments on monetizing the platform. Lista is still studying the local market since the app could go through different permutations.

“Not wallet maybe, there are different routes. We could go the lending route, we could look at credit cards, different financial services even,” Lim said.