BillGuard today has officially launched in Canada to bring support for Canadian credit cards. The service helps identify grey charges (fraud, double charges, unwanted charges) and alerts you via push notifications and there’s also support for Passbook as well.
As you can see below, the ‘add’ credit card screen now shows support for more Canadian credit cards—we were able to find support for the cards in our wallet.
We asked BillGuard what makes them different from another popular finance tracker, Mint. Dan Peguine, their director of product marketing, explained their app is ‘actionable’ while Mint is passive, as in BillGuard can notify you of extra charges or unknown charges, allowing you to take action as they happen (Mint can also send you email alerts on odd activity or extreme spending). An example he provides is BillGuard can notify you about data breaches at retailers you’ve shopped at.
BillGuard users can notify the app of questionable charges, basically taking advantage of crowdsourcing to spot unknown charges.
In terms of security, BillGuard uses bank-level encryption to keep your data private and secure. The app allows the setup of a 4-digit passcode and only has read-only access to your credit card activity.
BillGuard offers you the ability to track unlimited credit cards for free. There is also a web version of BillGuard which syncs to the iOS app and vice versa.
The service has raised over $13 million from investors, with one of them being Google’s Eric Schmidt via his VC company Innovation Endeavors. BillGuard says they have about 500,000 users in the U.S. and have identified close to $50 million in bad charges.
BillGuard’s trailer from 2011 is below along with a recent clip from ABC News:
The app is currently featured under ‘Best New Apps’ in the App Store and can be downloaded for free here.
Let us know what you think of BillGuard and if you’ve been using it to track your credit card activity.
Update: edit made to clarify BillGuard can track unlimited credit cards for free now (their press release had an error).
