by Nick Maynard, Director of Innovation, D2D Fund

The Financial Capability Development (FinCapDev) Competition is a nationwide competition administered by the Doorways to Dreams Fund (D2D) and the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI). It encourages and facilitates the development of innovative, fully-functional and market-ready mobile apps to increase consumers’ access to safe and fairly-priced financial products and services and help them make smarter financial choices. 

Proposals are due December 10th, 2012. If you haven’t registered and submitted your app proposal, please do so now at http://www.fincapdev.com/apply. 

FinCapDev (www.fincapdev.com) is offering 100,000 in prizes, including a $50,000 grand prize. In addition to the prizes, up to $10,000 in startup cash is being offered to finalist teams who compete for those prizes. 

We have partnered with some of the most innovative financial services, technology and design organizations in the world to provide finalist teams with tools (http://www.fincapdev.com/what/expert-resources/) to help build the next great personal finance app including: 

• Free access to evaluation licenses to Yodlee’s Software Development Toolkit 
• Access to Braintree Payments’ payment gateway tool 
• Eachscape’s DIY drag-and-drop app development environment and 
• Access to experts (e.g., IDEO, Ideas42, Citi, H&R Block). 

We need your ideas, your insights and your mobile app development talents to help Americans make smarter financial choices and leverage the power of smartphone technology to improve the way they manage their financial lives. 

Finalist apps will be evaluated by a panel of high-profile judges and winners will be selected at a finalist’s event in June 2013. The FinCapDev Competition is a follow-on competition to the U.S. Treasury’s MyMoneyAppUp Challenge which was also administered by D2D and CFSI. Click here for ideas and designs from MyMoneyAppUp (www.mymoneyapp.com).