Watching his friends gambling online and struggling to save money, Benjamin Thomas decided to help by creating a new app. Lodavo makes a game of saving money, and it’s free to use. Thomas is a Concordia University finance and computer science grad and a self-proclaimed savings nerd. “I loved learning about investing, saving money, and credit cards,” he said. Together with McGill University students Luke Freund and Arie Mednikov, he founded the savings app to help change the way this generation thinks about money. “A lot of people were turning to things like gambling, risky investments, crypto, and, unfortunately, some of them losing money through those,” said Thomas. ”I wanted to build an app where we can motivate people and steer them in the right direction towards building better savings habits.” Lodavo is simple: combine the goal of saving money with the chance to win prizes. “Integrate technology into our app to allow users to securely connect to their existing bank accounts,” said Thomas. ”They can then track their savings progress every week through our app without ever moving their money.” The more the user saves, the more tickets they earn, and those tickets pay out weekly cash prizes from partnerships, collaborations, promotional campaigns, and the founders’ personal funds. “It’s an app where instead of wasting your time scrolling — our generation calls it brain rot — you can spend your time on this app and hopefully learn some more,” said Thomas. ”We have daily savings tips, for example.” Lodavo launched on April 30 and, within days, already had 100 users. “We also had a waitlist of about 1,000 people who signed up across Canada,” said Thomas. The app is free, and its founders are planning to expand. “We have real exciting plans in the future. We’d love to partner with financial institution, offer other sort of products, and really expand what we’re offering.”
