US Treasury asks Facebook and Google to judge mobile finance app competition

The U.S. Department of the Treasury, together with partners the D2D Fund and the Center for Financial Services Innovation, has launched the "MyMoneyAppUp Challenge" to solicit ideas from the public for mobile applications to help Americans shape their financial futures everyday—even while on the move.

The Treasury Department has brought in experts from Facebook, Google and Harvard to help judge a public competition it is running to find financial services-related mobile apps.

Designs must be submitted by 12 August when they will be judged by a panel including Katie Burke Mitic, director of platform marketing at Facebook, Sendhil Mullainathan, professor of economics at Harvard, and Jonathan Weiner, business development, payments at Google.

The winning entrant will receive $10,000, two runners up $5000 and two honourable mentions $2500. They can then move on to the complimentary theFinCapDev competition to build a prototype.