Last year, I discovered a cool little web-based PFM app from Zions Bank, the Holiday Gift Planner (see previous post). It helps plan and track holiday gift lists and purchases (see second screenshot below).

I used it to track 2008 holiday purchases for our kids. I credit the app with not only keeping us on budget, but making the process a little less harried. I liked it so much, I awarded it with an OBR Best of the Web award. My only complaint: it should be an iPhone app.

But this weekend when I clicked my bookmark for the site to enter my son's "wish list", I received an error message, "site not found." I was afraid Zions had discontinued the service. After a search, I found that the site had been replaced by a similar, but more advanced PFM site, called Zions Bank eZ Budget (running on its own URL).

eZ Budget remains free and open to anyone, customers or non-customers. It still has the gift planner module which is very similar to last year's model (second screenshot). One addition: integrated links to the Zions website to see savings or financing options (see top-left in screenshot 2). And like last year, a Zions banner ad runs across the top.

But it's been expanded to have three other robust planning modules:

• Monthly planner (screenshot 3)
• Project planner (screenshot 4)
• Event planner (screenshot 5)

Unlike last year when the gift planner was plugged on its homepage, there is no mention of the PFM module on the bank's website. However, eZ Budget is prominently mentioned on the bank's Facebook page (screenshot 6). And according to Compete, the new site has about double the traffic, 4,000 unique visitors, compared to 2,000 a year ago.

 
Source: Compete, 23 Nov 2009

My take: This is a simple and cost-effective way to provide basic budgeting tools to bank customers. I wish Zions had also kept the standalone Holiday Gift Planner which had an attractive holiday look and was less daunting to begin using. But I can understand why the bank would not want to support two planning tools. More importantly, the iPhone version is still on my wish list. More on that tomorrow. 

1. Zions eZ Budget homepage (23 Nov 2009)

2. Gift Planner module
Note: Default setting is "Christmas"; but can choose Birthday, Valentines, Wedding, Mother's day, Father's day, Hanukkah, or create your own.

3. Monthly Planner module

4. Project planner module
Note: Default setting is "home remodel"; but can choose landscaping, baby room, or create your own.

5. Event planner module
Note: Default setting is "wedding"; but can choose birthday, vacation, or bridal shower or create your own.

6. Zions Facebook page (link)
Note: Zions is giving away a $100 Best Buy card each month to new Facebook fans.

Note:
1. For more information on the PFM space, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features.

Frankly, I haven't got my head completely around the latest acquisition in the alt-payments space (and I'm not the only one). I know that it makes my analyst life more interesting, but not sure what it means to the competitive landscape. Scott Loftesness over at Glenbrook Partners has the best analysis I've seen (also read the comments).

I'll break it down here. Revolution Money has two products:

1. RevolutionCard: Alt-payment card for use at the point of sale, both online and in-store.(see inset below from SeattleLuxe.com where RevolutionCard logo is right below Visa; full screenshot below). Unique PIN-based card with no account number or name (see below).

2. Revolution MoneyExchange: A person-to-person payment service.

Neither product appears to be very large. In the Q&A of the announcement webcast (press release), Revolution Money chairman Ted Leonsis said the company had signed 8,000 customers per day during a 90-day marketing test about a year ago. In total, it registered about 400,000 consumers (note 1). They also said they'd built merchant acceptance to about 1 million locations.  

The company declined to disclose the number of cardholders, but mentioned that each of its dozen marketing partnerships had brought in two or three thousand good cardholders. Leonsis said that given the current credit environment, they elected not to expand the cardholder portfolio, instead "doubling down" on platform features, such as ATM acceptance (note 2). 

But according to traffic figures from Compete, few Revolution Money customers were actively using its services. The P2P service, MoneyExchange, was the most-visited of the company's three sites with about 20,000 unique visitors last month, but that was down from 70,000 a year ago (during the marketing test). On the other hand, the Revolution Card volume was similar, just under 20,000, but up more than 50% year-over-year (see chart from Compete below).

 Compete: 18 Nov 2009, link

American Express opportunities
On the call (replay here through next week), American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault outlined seven opportunities it would pursue when the transaction closes early next year. Notably absent, person-to-person payments:

1. Reloadable prepaid products for new segments

2. Compete with other alternative payment companies (aka PayPal)

3. Payment products in social media services

4. Mobile payment offerings

5. International markets

6. Offer through banks that issue American Express cards

7. Pin-based debit offerings

During Q&A, Chenault emphasized how the acquisition was all about getting the Revolution Money platform/engine to allow AmEx to do things faster and for a lower cost. There was little talk of RM's brand, customers, or merchant base. The biggest discussion, during Q&A, was about reloadable prepaid cards.

My take: American Express purchased a platform they hope will allow it to get various new features/products to market faster and at lower costs to help head off total online-POS domination by PayPal. In addition, it acquired a proven team and management duo, and kept the whole works out of the hands of potential competitors such as Discover Card, Barclays, and others. While no one on the outside can understand the assumptions in the make vs. buy analysis, given its track record, American Express should be able profit from this $300 million IT investment. 

Online cards are sprouting new payment options
SeattleLuxe offers ten choices plus a link to pay by check (18 Nov 2009)

Notes:
1. This is a registered user count, not necessarily a user of the service. Many of the new customers came for the $25 signup bonus or just to kick the tires. There was no cost or obligation to register.
2. On the call, Revolution Money said that 80% of ATMs accept their card.

In preparation for our upcoming report, I re-read our first report on P2P payments published almost 10 years ago to the day (29 Nov 1999). Although written early in the game, I was very impressed with PayPal, a service launched two weeks earlier (15 Nov 1999) by Confinity, the original name of its parent company.

We've made our share of incorrect predictions over the years, but this one we got right (note 1), annointing PayPal with one of the first OBR Best of the Web awards. Here's our take from that original report, when PayPal was available as a payment option on just nine eBay auctions:

(PayPal) is not as well known as BidPay....but as soon as (eBay) participants discover (PayPal) is free and real-time, it should catch on quickly.

PayPal was originally developed as a payment mechanism between Palm Pilots, which explains the "beam money" call-to-action on top of the original user interface (below). But I wasn't a Palm user, so what got me excited about the service was the use of the email address to facilitate payments:

Much of (PayPal's) press coverage has focused on the Palm application...(but) it's the email-payment program that has the huge potential.

The rest, as they say, is history.

PayPal "send money" interface at its 1999 launch (15 Nov 1999)

PayPal "send money" today (19 Nov 2009)

Note:
1. And truth be told, we predicted  that PayPal would need to hook up with an existing payment player to get past trust issues. But luckily for them, the extremely deep-pocketed VCs in the bubble days floated PayPal a massive amount of cash so it could buy its way into the wallets of consumers.  

It's November and Thanksgiving is almost upon us here in the US. It's a great holiday, not only for the food, but also the concept that you should reflect and give thanks. And there are many things we're thankful for -- our families, our health, our country and our OBR/Finovate clients.

We're also thankful for YOU, our loyal readers who make this blog great by reading the posts, sharing your thoughts in the comments and emailing us frequently with ideas. And last but certainly not least we're thankful for our sponsors for helping us keep NetBanker the high-quality and free resource that you read and trust.

Please support our sponsors (listed below in alphabetical order) so that they continue to support NetBanker:

• Digital Insight, an Intuit company -- Showcasing their FinanceWorks (Online Banking + Quicken) solution. Check out a free recording of their recent webinar.
  


• Trusteer -- Complimentary white paper on "Addressing Customers' [Security] Concerns from Financial Trojans." Download it for free and see how banks like ING Direct use Trusteer to protect their customers from malware.


• Worklight -- Check out this new demo of how Worklight helps businesses securely engage their customers via widgets, social networks, iPhone apps and other consumer tools.
  


• Yodlee -- Download an new free whitepaper from Yodlee on "The Fast-Changing Market of PFM: What Consumers Really Want, And Why Banks Can't Afford to Wait.

Now, back to the regularly scheduled blogging.

P.S. If you'd like to join these companies in supporting NetBanker, please drop me an email at eric@netbanker.com.

The latest Advertising Age profiles the 40 hottest brands in the United States. In the current climate, I wasn't expecting to see a financial brand. But there was a one financial tech company that made the list.

Intuit's TurboTax. It even made the cover photo montage (see inset), although you have to look carefully to see the box laying flat in front (note 1).

Who would have thought tax prep software could be cool? Part of the reason: TurboTax's marketing VP, Andy Young, has been pushing the envelope looking for novel ways to market tax prep services. For example, last year TurboTax was the first company to use a Google program that displayed an Intuit tweet stream on AdSense partner sites such as Facebook, MySpace and VentureBeat (see screenshot below from our previous post). Clickthroughs went to Intuit's Twitter page, rather than its main website (note 2).

And things were clicking last year for TurboTax with 11% growth to 18 million units, despite an 11% decline in boxed-unit sales. The growth driver? Online of course, up 36% year over year.  

Implications for FIs: Banks have driven users to TurboTax for years earning a slice of revenue under affiliate deals. But the potential to provide TurboTax services is set to grow exponentially.   As announced in September's Finovate, tax prep/TurboTax will soon be integrated directly (e.g single signon) in Digital Insight's FinanceWorks. 

VentureBeat home page (9 April 2009)

Note:
1. I might have missed the TurboTax box, because I was too fixated on the Five Guys cup on the left, which is coming to Seattle very soon.
2. For more info on leveraging Twitter, see our report published in May, Online Banking Report: Connecting to Customers with Twitter.

Bank of America's latest online effort is a personal finance educational site at <learn.bankofamerica.com> that includes consumer polls, money savings tips, videos and articles. Bank products are sprinkled throughout but the marketing is relatively restrained.

It's a solid effort. Good, concise copy married to an attractive graphical layout. And for a bank the size of Bank of America, it makes perfect business sense. The site moves a little product, builds the brand, shows off the bank's consumer-friendly side, provides material for PR campaigns, and gains some CRA credit (note 1). 

But I'm not sure how much usage it will get other than the curious driven to it from banners within online banking. That's how ended up there today after paying my BofA credit card bill online (see second screenshot below).

Given Bank of America's 30 million online banking customers, they must not be driving much traffic to the site yet. According to Compete, traffic surpassed 100,000 for the first time in October. July was the first month that traffic was registered at the site.

Unique monthly visitors to BofA's personal finance tips site (July through October, 2009)

Source: Compete

Other than enabling an RSS feed for article updates, the site has no Web 2.0 or social media features. No blog. No forum. It's just a very pretty face on personal finance 101 material. It will be interesting to see where they take it.

Learn.BankofAmerica.com homepage (link, 13 Nov. 2009)
Note: I completed the poll on the middle of the page, so the results are shown rather than the poll question.

Logoff screen (13 Nov 2009, 3 PM Pacific)

Note:
1. CRA = Community Reinvestment Act which requires banks to help meet the financial and credit needs of low- to-moderate-income consumers.

Are you tired of hearing "there's an app for that" yet? Well, get used to it, we are still at the beginning of the great app rollout. 

Even as recently as our iPhone Banking Report published in March, I assumed most financial institutions would have a single iPhone app. One bank. One app. It's how the Web worked, for the most part.  

But when Starbucks unveiled a dedicated app just for its stored-value card (separate from the main Starbucks brand app), I realized that I wasn't thinking big enough.

For example, in August PNC Bank become the first U.S. financial institution to offer multiple apps when it released an app for its Gen-Y-focused Virtual Wallet. That was followed last week by Wells Fargo when it unveiled its cash-management app for larger businesses, CEO Mobile (screenshot below; press release).

Now, I believe that each major bank will roll out dozens of apps, perhaps hundreds, to support their business lines, major products and large segments. There will be an app for each major affinity credit/debit card, one for students, one for small businesses, one for large business, one for senior checking, one for home equity lines, and so on.

And, if that's not enough, there could be a dedicated app for each stock broker, loan officer and mortgage broker. There could be one app for every branch, neighborhood, or region. Right now the search-and-discovery tools at Apple would implode under the weight of all these apps. But they'll figure that out. It's worth billions to them. 

Today, more than 100,000 apps are available for the iPhone. But fewer than 20 are for U.S. financial institutions. It's conceivable that in the banking vertical itself, well over 10,000 apps could be developed, possibly many tens of thousands (see notes 1, 2). 

Wells Fargo is first U.S. bank with a cash management iPhone app (12 Nov 2009)

Notes:
1. They won't all be iPhone apps. The mobile market is too big to have it all consolidated at one player. 
2. It's also conceivable that we'll move away from the dedicated app framework, and users will be able to configure their phones with hundreds of info feeds without needing to install an app for each one. More like the iGoogle portal model.  It will be fascinating to see how it plays out.