"The flaw in traditional financial management tools is their reliance on objectivity, rationality, budgeting and discipline," says Davel. 

"People are hardwired to make choices on instinct, intuition and emotion. It doesn’t matter how many budgets we do, or how many books we read, we will still act like the complex, emotionally governed human beings we are. 22seven works with this and offers insight into our money blind spots and black holes.

"The impact is huge because there is no hiding from how, where and when you spend your money. This is the first step in the service. You start by just looking at how you have spent your money in the past. Once we understand our history we can look at our present and then plan for our future."

How safe is 22seven?

Almost everyone alive would love to find money they didn’t know they had.  However, few will be willing to hand over their most treasured banking details to a third party they have never heard about.

22seven makes use of a service called Yodlee to extract information from a user's bank account.  In other words, it's not actually 22seven but Yodlee that accesses your account.  Yodlee then passes the information it gets from your account to 22seven.  At no point does 22seven possess your login details, username or passwords and there is no way it can ever see it or store it.

But who the heck is Yodlee and why would you trust them?  Well, Yodlee has 30-million users and in 11 years it has been doing business it has never had a single breach of security.  Do you know of any bank, anywhere, with a perfect track record like that?

Is 22seven absolutely infallible?  Of course not!  A fool-proof system does not exist.  Having said that, (and fully admitting that I don't understand all the technical explanations of what supposedly makes 22seven so secure) I believe 22seven and its partner Yodlee is about as safe as any online bank.  It is fully endorsed by FNB (in other words, if Yodlee is compromised, you're not liable) with Davel still negotiating with the other banks to get their support in this regard.

So (at least for FNB's customers) if you trust your bank you can trust 22seven. 

Article continues on page three: how 22seven deals with cash transactions and how to access the service...