In an email to customers, Zip announced Pocketbook will be axed effective 5 August, with the popular budgeting app claiming in excess of 800,000 users.

The company claims to have saved users more than $10 million by delivering budgeting, spending and expense categorisation insights.

It's expected Zip Co will bring some of Pocketbook's money management features to its own app. 

Pocketbook used controversial screen scraping methods to gather banking and budgeting insights from its users. 

Such methods usually require the user to input their online banking passwords into the app.

Pocketbook will delete all personal user information, and also securely delete all financial and transaction information.

Users can extract their categorised transaction data into a CSV file until 4 August.


This comes days after Zip Co increased the interest rate on its line of credit service Zip Money to 21.9% p.a. - an increase of two percentage points.

Zip also recently binned line of credit programs to small businesses, where businesses could access up to $150,000 in instalment plans.

Managing director Larry Diamond cited potential regulation and new competition from Apple Pay as headwinds for its BNPL business.

Zip reported a full year loss of $659 million in 2021, and its share price has gone from $8.78 a year ago to 56 cents at the time of writing.

A Zip spokesperson said the brand will focus on profitable areas of the business.

"Zip’s operating environment has changed significantly in the last few months and we need to adapt our strategy on the factors we can control, and accelerate our path to global profitability," they said.

"With this in mind, we have made the decision to close Pocketbook in order to reprioritise resources to focus on delivering sustainable profitability in our core Australia-New Zealand market."


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      All products with a link to a product provider’s website have a commercial marketing relationship between us and these providers. These products may appear prominently and first within the search tables regardless of their attributes and may include products marked as promoted, featured or sponsored. The link to a product provider’s website will allow you to get more information or apply for the product. By de-selecting “Show online partners only” additional non-commercialised products may be displayed and re-sorted at the top of the table. For more information on how we’ve selected these “Sponsored”, “Featured” and “Promoted” products, the products we compare, how we make money, and other important information about our service, please click here. Rates correct as of October 9, 2024. View disclaimer.

      Important Information and Comparison Rate Warning

      Image by Pocketbook, (via Stockspot)