Mounting API fees, bank outages, and a cross-border move almost crushed Trackfundx. Instead of giving up, co-founders Precious Arikeri and Wahab Balogun ditched open banking entirely to build a global AI tool that reads receipts instead. In this edition of Day 1 to 1000, OPEYEMI KAREEM charts how a lockdown spending problem evolved into a platform serving 10,000 users across 100 countries.
When COVID-19 lockdowns began in 2020, daily commutes stopped, social outings disappeared, and life moved indoors. Spending, in theory, should have dropped. For Precious Arikeri, the opposite happened. Between frequent online orders, data top-ups, and bank transfers, she found herself spending more than usual—with no easy way to track where the money was going.
“I was spending more than I would usually spend even while I was going to the office. I was ordering a lot, spending more on data because we were home, and buying a lot of things online, but I couldn’t track.”
She searched for an app to help, but available personal finance tools were poorly suited to how Nigerians manage money. Some required tedious manual entry; others were too rigid to adapt to her spending habits.
Originally published by TechCabal.