We’ve just been informed that Finance Web startup Kublax will be heading into administration and closing its doors officially on Friday 19th February.
The UK company, which did see some traction, sent an email out to its customers a few minutes ago.
Kublax is a secure online personal financial management platform which automatically aggregates all of your UK bank and credit card accounts into one place. The brainchild of Sridhar Sethuraman, a former IT and management consultant, the company was also one of six companies to win investment from Seedcamp in 2007.
Launched in August 2007 and hailed as the UK’s answer to mint, the company raised two rounds of funding totaling €2 Million.
The company assures its customers in its email posted below all user data will be deleted and no further information (including financial data) will be gathered and stored for Kublax customers.
What other options do UK customers have? Sadly not many. MoneyDashboard is the most immediate alternative although it has yet to officially launch. LoveMoney.com also seems to have some potential. Let’s not forget the likes of Wesabe, worth a look, but unfortunately doesn’t feature deep integration with UK banks accounts.
Anyone else worth looking at?
Full Email Below:
It is with great regret that we announce the closure of our service as we have been forced to take the business into administration. Over the course of the last 6 months we have been trying hard to raise funding which would have allowed us to launch our enhanced new product and develop our offering further. Unfortunately we now have to admit defeat.
We are sorry that we have not been able to repay your trust in Kublax and particularly disappointed not to be able to launch the new enhanced version of the service which was being shaped to a very large extent by your Feedback on the current service.
Kublax’s partner, Yodlee, will be deleting all user data, including online banking details from its servers. Once deleted no further information will be gathered and stored for Kublax customers. Your transactional data will also be completely erased from our servers by close of business on Friday 19th February. We will not pass your data on to any third parties.
If you wish to contact Sridhar or I you can reach us at the following email address – kublaxenquiry@googlemail.com
Many thanks again for your support and we hope that Kublax was able to help you make slightly better sense of your finances over the last year or so.
Tom and Sridhar
Meanwhile, Mint.com,asimilar service in the US, is doing great. Where did this difference come from?
The UI and design in general was nowhere near as on point as mint.com – why cant anyone get this right… Not holding my breath for the likes of http://www.moneydashboard.com/ to get it right either.
Bring on mint.co.uk, will that ever happen?
whats slighly worrying is that this email mentions yodlee as a partner…..
yodlee is still going….does that mean their future is limited too….
Whats suprised me in this marketplace is these services are being offered for free….I would gladly pay for the service as i think its invaluable….if it meant there was less chance of these companies going under….
whats slighly worrying is that this email mentions yodlee as a partner…..
yodlee is still going….does that mean their future is limited too….
Whats suprised me in this marketplace is these services are being offered for free….I would gladly pay for the service as i think its invaluable….if it meant there was less chance of these companies going under….
@cliff Why would Yodlee's future be limited? Kublax was hardly their biggest customer.
If it's a service you're willing to pay for, keep an eye out for a product called Xero Personal
We're sorry to hear the recent news from the Kublax team, we launched our online banking service last year, have a look and see what you think, http://bit.ly/aUpEiA we love hearing customer feedback.
Money Dashboard offers an alternative to Kublax. Our free online personal finance software tool, also using Yodlee technology is currently in the process of beta testing.
We're testing extensively because we want to make sure the product is just right, in terms of both functionality and user interface, before we launch it to the UK market. Money Dashboard not only enables you to tag your transactions but also helps you to set up budgets, allowing you to track your spend using our monthly tracker.
With Money Dashboard you can build a realistic picture of your spending, identify where savings can be made and set a budget you can actually achieve.
We are very secure and well financed – we've already received £1M in funding last year.
If you haven't already, we'd love for you to sign up as a Beta tester on our site. We're releasing the product to the Beta testers in waves, and will fully launch Money Dashboard in the spring.
Singed up as beta tester a month back, when do the waves happen ;) ?
moneyStrands is another option. We support many UK banks and also allow users to manually import data via a CSV file. More information can be found at http://www.moneyStrands.com
Kublax were the UK pioneers, they probably took too much development pain and were the first UK Yodlee client. The service is not faultless, many UK banks are not listed, and customer service is passionate and powerful when you are dealing with peoples banking transactions. I think these reasons, coupled with the hyper competitive UK distribution battle in personal finance probably undid all the efforts that had come from the Kublax team.
Theres a more in depth post on our thoughts at our blog http://bit.ly/bSv5Xo
We are sending out new invitations every week, but we have received a massive number of requests, so you may have to wait for an invite. But we plan to open the product up to all users this Spring, so as long as you have signed up you won't have too long to wait.