| By Jim Bruene on December 20, 2007 3:08 PM | Comments (2) |
Intuit has been beta testing a fully online version of its flagship product Quicken since September. According to Eileen Ambrose, writing for the The Baltimore Sun (here), the product will launch Jan. 8, 2008, at a price of $2.99/mo (note 1), $12 more than the entry-level, packaged version ($24 at Amazon), but $8 less than Quicken Deluxe ($44 at Amazon).
Intuit is already advertising it on Google when searching "quicken online." Below is a screenshot of the landing page (here):
The service is still in beta and requires an "application" to use. Interestingly, one of the requirements listed in the FAQ is that beta testers must allow Intuit to download data from their bank account nightly. So obviously, account aggregation is a key component, not that that's a surprise. Automated account downloading is now "table stakes" for online personal finance.
We'll look at the service in detail after we've had a chance to use it.
Note:
1. Intuit's ad on Google says (below), "Sign up for the new Quicken Online Free!" which sounds like a lot less than $36/yr.
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Jim,
When you theorized that Google could create an online PFM solution (http://www.netbanker.com/2006/10/google-online-quicken-clone.html) you also talked about how that would be bad for banks.
Why no mention of that when discussing this Online Quicken?
Looking at the reasons listed in your previous article as to why it would be bad for banks, they all seem to hold true here as well.
-- Andrew Taylor
CTO Jwaala
@Andrew
Good point and thanks for the cross reference. Here's the relative passage from my previous post a year ago:
"What impact would (non-bank personal finance sites) have on financial institutions? For banks with basic "plain vanilla" online banking, it could be a major threat if users began storing their banking transactions at Google. Users would log in to their banks far less often, diminishing the opportunities to cross-sell and service customers. And with the transaction archives stored elsewhere, it would be much easier for consumers to switch banks, reducing the relationship value of online banking and bill pay."
But that's only if banks do nothing, which I seriously doubt. Here's the next paragraph from that post:
"To avoid being marginalized by online personal-finance services, banks should boost their feature-set to include basic financial-management features, such as payment categorization, long-term storage, and reporting."
And I expect that will happen, especially now that easy to use tools are available from Jwaala and others.