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As financial pressures continue to reshape everyday life in Sri Lanka, individuals and businesses alike are paying closer attention to how money is managed. Rising costs, multiple bank accounts, credit cards, and scattered transaction notifications have made financial clarity harder to achieve. While global expense-tracking apps are widely available, many fail to work effectively within Sri Lanka’s banking environment.
Kiwi Money emerged as a response to this gap. Rather than adapting an overseas model, the app was built around local banking behaviour and user habits. At the centre of this approach is its founders, Harrish Selvarajah and Kavishma Jayasinghe who developed the product after personally experiencing the limitations of existing financial tools in Sri Lanka.
A Founder Identifying a Local Problem
Before Kiwi Money existed, founders encountered a familiar frustration. Transactions were recorded across different banks and cards, yet understanding overall spending required manually reviewing SMS alerts or switching between multiple banking apps. International expense trackers often required manual entry or relied on bank API integrations that are not consistently available in Sri Lanka.
Instead of seeing this as a constraint, founders focused on a resource already embedded in local banking systems: SMS transaction alerts. Sri Lankan banks reliably notify customers of card payments, transfers, and balances via text message. The insight was simple but practical—if these alerts could be read and organised automatically, users could gain clarity without changing their behaviour.
That idea became the foundation of Kiwi Money.
Building Kiwi Money for Sri Lanka
Founded in 2025 and operating from Colombo, Kiwi Money was developed as an automated expense tracker designed specifically for Sri Lankan users. The app works with SMS alerts from major local banks, including Commercial Bank, Sampath Bank, Hatton National Bank (HNB), Bank of Ceylon (BOC), and Nations Trust Bank (NTB), as stated in its official app listings.
Available on both Android and iOS, Kiwi Money does not require users to log into their bank accounts or provide banking passwords. Instead, after the user grants permission, the app reads incoming SMS notifications, extracts transaction details, and organises them into a structured expense record.
This approach avoids the need for complex bank integrations and reduces friction for users who may be cautious about sharing sensitive credentials.
How the App Works in Practice
Once installed, Kiwi Money automatically identifies debit and credit transactions from bank SMS messages. Amounts are recorded in Sri Lankan Rupees, and transactions are categorised using logic tailored to local merchants and spending patterns.
For example, supermarket purchases are categorised as groceries, fuel station payments are logged under transport or fuel, and mobile reloads are grouped under utilities. This localisation addresses a common shortcoming of global apps, which often misclassify Sri Lankan merchants or fail to recognise them entirely.
Users are presented with a dashboard that includes timelines, category breakdowns, and visual summaries of spending. Rather than offering overly complex analytics, the app focuses on clarity—helping users understand where their money goes over time.
Budgeting and Financial Awareness
In addition to tracking, Kiwi Money includes budgeting features that allow users to set monthly spending limits by category. The app monitors progress and alerts users when they approach those limits. This feature is designed to support awareness rather than impose rigid restrictions.
Users can also view a consolidated snapshot of spending and balances across multiple cards and accounts, reducing the need to move between different banking apps. For individuals managing several accounts, this unified view simplifies day-to-day financial monitoring.
Privacy, Data Handling, and Trust
Kiwi Money positions itself as a privacy-conscious product, and its official Privacy Policy provides important context. The app states that it does not ask for bank login credentials and does not sell, rent, or trade user data.
However, according to the Privacy Policy, some transaction data is processed and stored on servers to enable categorisation, analytics, and features such as backups. Data is described as encrypted in transit and at rest. The policy also references integrations with third-party services for analytics and subscriptions.
This distinction matters. While Kiwi Money promotes a local-first approach, it is more accurate to say that the app prioritises user control and avoids direct bank integrations, rather than claiming that all data remains exclusively on the device. This transparency is important for user trust, particularly in financial applications.
The app also offers optional backups, including to a user’s personal Google Drive, further supporting data continuity without requiring full cloud-based account systems.
From Individuals to Businesses
As the user base grew, founders expanded the product’s scope to address business use cases. Kiwi Money Business was introduced for teams and organisations that rely on SMS alerts for corporate cards and accounts.
The business version enables expense tracking across team members, generation of reports by category or department, and basic budget oversight without introducing heavyweight accounting software. Public pricing information indicates plans starting at approximately $1.49 per user per month, billed annually, with options for larger organisations.
This expansion reflects a broader vision: providing practical financial visibility tools that scale from individual users to small and medium-sized enterprises without increasing complexity.
Growth Driven by User Feedback
Kiwi Money’s development has followed an incremental, feedback-driven approach. Updates mentioned publicly include improved merchant recognition, expanded support for additional banks such as Seylan Bank and Standard Chartered, and the introduction of manual account additions for transactions that fall outside automated parsing.
The company’s public presence suggests a small team, consistent with an early-stage product focused on refinement rather than rapid expansion. According to platform listings, Kiwi Money reports over 2,000 users, a figure presented as a company claim rather than an independently audited statistic. Google Play currently shows over 1,000 downloads, providing partial platform-level confirmation of adoption.
A Founder-Led Fintech With Local Intent
Kiwi Money is not positioned as a disruptive challenger to banks or a replacement for traditional financial systems. Instead, it functions as a layer of clarity on top of existing banking behaviour. This restraint is central to the founders’ approach—solving a narrow but real problem without adding unnecessary complexity.
By focusing on automation through SMS, avoiding bank credential collection, and designing categorisation logic for Sri Lankan merchants, Kiwi Money demonstrates how fintech products can succeed by aligning closely with local realities.
Looking Ahead
Public statements indicate that future development will continue to refine automation, expand supported banks and merchants, and introduce additional tools related to recurring payments and bill tracking. While long-term plans evolve, the underlying philosophy remains consistent: financial tools should reduce friction, not add to it.
Conclusion
Kiwi Money represents a founder-led response to a distinctly Sri Lankan problem. Shaped by Harrish Selvarajah’s and Kavishma Jayasinghe‘s own experience navigating fragmented financial information, the app prioritises practicality, local relevance, and cautious handling of user data.
In a fintech landscape often dominated by imported solutions, Kiwi Money stands out not for scale or spectacle, but for fit. Its continued relevance will depend on how well it maintains this alignment as it grows—but its foundation is firmly rooted in the realities of Sri Lankan users.
