As consumers, our financial lives come in pieces, and each piece has its own providers providing services and advice: bankers, brokers, planners, etc. While each has their own specialisation, how those pieces fit together is generally left to us.
But linking those pieces and filling the gaps between can cost a lot… time, effort, money and dedication. And that cost is, more often than not, one that most people can’t afford. So most of us, most of the time, spend our lives tackling our finances piecemeal and often haphazardly. And even when we’re doing our best, there’s often a niggling uncertainty about whether we’re doing enough.
That’s the problem Lucie Money is being built to fix. The case, in short:
- Most people’s financial lives come in about seven pieces: everyday money, payments, savings, credit and loans, a home loan, insurance and super, investments.
- Each provider often sees just their own piece, sometimes more than one, and rarely the whole picture across our financial lives.
- Help that looks across all of it has mostly been available to people who can afford a financial planner, and adviser numbers have almost halved since 2018 and haven’t recovered.
- Lucie Money is being built to provide that assistance: one agent, on our side, across all our financial lives.
- Lucie will get there in steps, in the order that regulation supports.
Everybody provides a piece of the puzzle
Your bank looks after the products it sells you. It knows about your transaction account, your card with that bank, maybe some savings or a loan; and that’s often the scope of what it can see.
A budgeting app will show you what you connect to it, often very nicely. Then generally you have to do the thinking and the checking.
A mortgage broker will find you a home loan and often build an ongoing relationship, but the process can sometimes involve weeks of documentation, a surprising amount of it still on paper.
A financial plan covers the most ground of everything. It’s also a long process, and it comes at a price that, to be honest, puts it out of reach for a lot of people for most of their lives.
Then there’s insurance. Most of us choose car and home insurance mainly on price, because it’s what we have to have. Life and income cover usually comes by default inside our super, and few of us ever check whether it fits.
And super. Unless you can afford a financial planner, getting affordable, useful advice on superannuation is pretty hard. Most people accept the default fund that was set up for them, maybe the one from their first job, and might never make a conscious choice about where or how their money is invested. Advice on a small balance is generally cost-prohibitive, and a small balance is what most people have until they’re well on in years.
The trouble is that most people, most of the time, don’t cover all these pieces as well as they want. And that’s before you think about the issues that arise where the pieces meet; the joins between them can sometimes get blurred:
- a fixed rate rolling off your home loan changes what’s left each month for the rest of your finances
- savings sitting in one place while a credit card charges interest somewhere else
- a pay rise that could be going into an offset account but is sitting in a transaction account instead.
Each of those shows up in one provider’s system but matters in another’s, and the only ones in a position to see all of it are you and me.
And some questions sit between providers entirely… saving for a house (if anyone can afford one these days), or whether property is a better bet than other kinds of investment: that sort of thing can just fall through the cracks. Which means that making sense of it all often falls to the person with the least time and, often, the least expertise to do it.
And I include myself here honestly. I’ve written before about how well I (don’t) keep on top of my own finances.
And help is scarce. At Intersekt in Melbourne earlier this month, a panel on retirement made the point that there’s more and more money to manage and fewer people to help manage it. Australia’s super system is on track to become one of the two largest pension pools in the world, while adviser numbers have almost halved since 2018 and haven’t recovered. Most people need fairly simple, rules-based help and don’t have the time or the know-how to do it themselves.
We now have the ability to change that
When I resigned from my job in early 2025, I could see AI was going to change personal finance. Well it’s moved faster than I expected and it’s not alone. Three things have arrived at more or less the same time:
- AI can now understand a situation, explain it in plain language and, within limits, act on it.
- And people have got used to talking to software and expecting a sensible answer back; this not only changes the user experience but also the entire product paradigm
- Open Banking is growing fast in Australia, which means real data, with consent, straight from the bank: Lucie Money connected to its first real bank accounts through it in August.
It’s the combination that matters: together they make it possible, for the first time, to build something that looks across the whole of a person’s money, at a cost most people can afford.
What we’re building, and in what order
So the way we describe Lucie Money now is as a personal money agent for all your financial life. An agent, not a dashboard: one that’s designed to know your whole position, watch over it, tell you what matters and, in time, help you act on it.
And our plans for Lucie are expansive. Lucie is designed to deepen its functionality as trust, capability and the regulatory framework allows:
- The first step is understanding. Lucie is being built to know where you stand across your bank accounts and tell you what needs your attention, so you stop having to go looking. That’s what we’re building now.
- Then we plan that Lucie will advise: what to do about something, what it would cost or save, and where the catch is.
- And then, if you want it to, it will act, inside rules you set, coming back to you if required before anything is committed.
A lot of the order is set by regulation. Limited everyday money management doesn’t need a financial services licence, so we’re building that first. But personal advice and help with credit do, and we’re preparing to apply for the licences they need. So product comparisons and help with home loans and other credit will come once those licences are in place, and, over time, personal advice more widely, including investments and super. Starting narrow is what makes the rest reachable; we anticipate that each step will be supported by the record of the one before it.
We’re at the first step now, and still aiming to launch our first test capabilities later this year.
If you’d like to be part of it, there’s a waitlist at lucie.money.