NAB pursues popular budgeting app YNAB over ‘common syllable’
National Australia Bank is suing You Need a Budget, a budgeting platform based in the United States, for allegedly infringing on its decades-long trademark and ignoring demands for a rebranding for over a year.
You Need a Budget is stylised as YNAB and is the seventh most-profitable app on the Google Play Store. But the bank says YNAB is “deceptively similar” to its own brand, and will confuse users because “the addition of Y to NAB is likely to suggest to consumers a sub-brand of services connected”.
NAB is concerned that consumers will think YNAB’s budgeting platform is one of the bank’s sub-brands. Bloomberg
“The respective marks sound very similar, as they are likely to be
pronounced ‘nab’ ‘why-nab’, such that they share the common syllable pronounced ‘nab’,” according to the bank’s Federal Court filings.
NAB alleges that it first demanded changes to the brandings in a letter to YNAB’s London solicitors in September last year, but YNAB “refused to do so, and will continue to engage in that conduct unless restrained by this court”.
Any change of branding could be damaging for YNAB, which is one of the most downloaded apps across Apple and Android devices.
The app has been downloaded more than a million times on the Google Play Store and is one of the shopfront’s top-grossing programs. While it is free to download, YNAB advertises monthly subscriptions that cost up to $US14.99 ($23.52) per month. On the Apple App Store, it has nearly 50,000 ratings.
YNAB did not respond to a request for comment before publication and has not yet filed a defence.
NAB said its brand was “critical” for customer trust and had to be protected. “We’re concerned about the potential for customer confusion arising from You Need a Budget’s use
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