If you read the technology press at all, you are probably growing tired of all the buzz around “portals.” Portals are the on-ramps to the Internet, currently the key spots for advertising revenue and investor enthusiasm. The busiest portals today are Yahoo, whose name is practically synonymous with the Internet, and the major browser default pages at Netscape, AOL, and Microsoft, which is creating a new branded portal called Start www.start.com . Users can tweak their browsers to start on any Web page, but most simply maintain the default setting. Owning a default site is like being able to license the blinking 12:00 display on a VCR.

Most analysts expect only a handful of portals to survive and the early leaders, Yahoo, Excite (partially owned by Intuit), Infoseek, and Netscape, have seen dramatic growth in their stock prices this summer. Financial institutions, even one-stop shops such as Citigroup, have little chance in competing with Microsoft in the portal realm. But financial institutions of all sizes can build personal finance hubs, becoming the central point for financial information, planning, and transactions.

Quicken.com: The #1 personal finance hub.

We expect most Web users will gravitate to single financial hub that will aggregate data across multiple financial institutions; serve as the bill payment/presentment center; and consolidate various types of debt obligations. Intuit’s Quicken.com (screenshot above) has the early lead in the race to become the dominant personal finance hub.

Source: adapted from a ramework reported in Ziff-Davis’s AnchorDesk, 7/1/98, www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2263.html

The first commercially successful electronic financial hubs were Managing Your Money, Quicken and Microsoft Money. But the shrink-wrapped hub is now the “dinosaur,” a remnant of the world before the big bang of the Internet. An ironic turn of events since 1994’s “dinosaur-Gates” controversy about bypassing banks via Microsoft Money. Should You Build a Financial Hub?

Not everyone should try to be a hub. As long as your sales and retention goals can be satisfied through traditional channels, your Web site can serve quite well as an extension of your call center delivering data, handling routine transactions, and answering customer queries.

But if you are looking to pick-up incremental sales and/or new households from your Web presence, we think you should consider becoming a financial hub. With so many outsourcing and cost-sharing opportunities, it doesn’t have to be a costly undertaking. Even if you don’t have the resources to create a financial hub on your own, you can team with others to make it work. For example, all the credit unions in Portland could contribute $1 per member to build a Portland-based financial hub used as the start-point for financial activities at each credit union. The hub could be personalized in such a way to appear proprietary to each participating credit union.

The goal of this double issue is to help you think through the design of a cost-effective and compelling personal finance hub. The information will be structured a bit differently than normal. We were inspired by a recent Wall Street Journal article describing an autonomous team of engineers and thinkers at Intuit dubbed “Quicken killers.” It’s their job to develop features and concepts that if successfully implemented by the competition, would put Quicken out of business. In that spirit we offer our vision of a “bank killer,” an unregulated Web-based company that cherry-picks the most profitable banking customers and passes them on to the highest bidder. We’ve named this hypothetical institution, www.AmazonBank.com , with the goal that it would do for financial services what Amazon.com did for books.

In this report we’ll lay out the business plan and high-level product design. Over the next six months we’ll drill down into detailed product designs for the various building blocks of a financial hub (table below).