Intuit joined the messaging race with the beta release of Quicken Beam. The free service sends users text-messaged balance-and-activity alerts from most U.S. bank, credit card, and credit union accounts. Users may also query the service for balance plus last five transactions by texting "Bal" to the short code 636363.

Currently, the service runs independently of Quicken and can be used by anyone free of charge. According to the official press release, the service was developed in Intuit Labs.

What's innovative
It's not a new feature. Quicken Online (see second screenshot below), along with most major banks and personal finance specialists (Mint, Rudder, Wesabe), already support text-message alerts (see note 1). But this is a relatively low-cost way to hook users early on with an extremely simple service, then migrate them to more robust Intuit services later on (Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax).

And the Quicken stamp of approval means a lot when turning over your log-in credentials to a third party. If you want to talk to the company about Quicken Beam, Intuit will be demo'ing the latest features of Quicken Online at our Finovate Conference in October. 

Financial institutions that lack text-message support might consider linking customers to Quicken Beam. Yes, you are turning customers over to another financial provider, and yes, your compliance folks will hate it. But customers are going to do it whether you want them to or not. You might as well get credit for making a solid recommendation. And realistically, using Quicken Beam is unlikely to hasten anyone's exit from your bank or credit union.

Qucken Beam homepage (25 Aug 2008) 

 Text messaging in Quicken Online (25 Aug 2008)

Notes:
1. Geezeo really differentiated itself with mobile capabilities in its May 2007 launch. 

2. For more information, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features.

Earlier this week, Visa launched its Facebook Business Network. While the first to use Facebook, several other major financial institutions have opened small biz networks on the Web in the past six months:

• Advanta's Ideablob launched last September at DEMOfall (previous post here). It's a unique website with monthly contests awarding $10,000 to the best idea, as voted on by users. It's an intriguing concept with decent traction, almost 30,000 unique visitors last month according to Compete (see chart below). (Full disclosure: I just realized I'm wearing an Ideablob t-shirt; schwag can still pay off!)
  
• American Express's OpenForum: As the name suggests, it's a business forum and resource directory, not unlike Bank of America's (see below). American Express has added posts from several prominent bloggers such as John Battelle's Searchblog and Anita Campbell's Small Biz Trends to keep the site fresh. The site has 5,400 members and monthly traffic of about 11,000 unique visitors, up threefold from a year ago.  
  
• Bank of America's Small Business Online Community, a general forum and resource directory, launched in Oct 2007 (see original post here). It's primarily a forum, with some additional articles on the side. Total membership is just under 15,000.
  
• Capital One's Slingshot, launched in February, is primarily a business directory. But it does aim for community involvement with user-submitted business reviews and comments on certain topics.
  
• HSBC's (UK) Business Network: Another forum-and-blog site similar to AmEx's OpenForum. So far it appears lightly used, with just six blog entries this year and 270 member profiles.
  
• Intuit's Quickbooks Group: Although not a financial institution, the Quickbooks site is a good example of an active community with more content, including ten blogs, and as much traffic as the others combined (not including BofA which is unknown) with nearly 90,000 unique visitors, almost double the number a year ago.
  

 Unique website visitors in May 2008 (source: Compete)

I've written about how the iPhone could change the way consumers use mobile phones to access data (see note 1). But this slide from the Steve Jobs keynote yesterday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), says it much better:

In case you can't read the slide, it says that 98% of iPhone users use the built-in Safari browser, 94% use email and 90% use text messaging. That's an amazing level of usage for what used to be considered "advanced" smartphone features. So far, the impact on ecommerce companies has been relatively small, with just 6 million users worldwide. But with Apple dropping the price by 50% to $199, there will soon be 10, 20, or 30 million Americans connecting to the Web via iPhone. If 90%+ use the browser and messaging, it will have a major impact in online/mobile banking usage.

New App Store
And to help those millions of new users find useful things to do on their phone, Apple is building a new App Store, accessible directly from the main deck of the iPhone once users download the 2.0 software in July. The App Store will include thousands of applications optimized for the iPhone that can be downloaded over the air.

Some will have a cost, with the developer keeping 70% of the revenue, but most are expected to be free. Since there is NO COST to list your app in Apple's App Store (see update below), financial services companies should rush to get their app loaded as close to the July 11 launch date as possible.

So far, only two banks, Bank of America and Germany's Postbank, have included their apps in the current online applications directory (here). A number of other financial apps are listed including Wesabe, Buxfer, and the latest, QuickBooks from Intuit (see inset right and screenshots below). Expect many more in the months and years to come.

Update 11 June: Important clarification from commenter "gerontius" (number 3 below). The current app directory includes webpages optimized for the iPhone. The new App Directory will include "native" apps that run directly on the iPhone operating system. That makes the bar quite a bit higher, depending on what you want to do. 

Bank of America    Buxfer  

myBudget        Postbank 

Wesabe           Yodlee 

Note:

1. For more info, see our Online Banking Report on Mobile Banking

The two dozen online competitors of Intuit's Quicken can breathe a sigh of relief today. The 800-lb guerilla has done them a favor, levying a monthly fee for its new online-only option, Quicken Online (press release here). While the $2.99/mo fee, after a free month, is reasonable, it's much different than FREE. Look for the websites of the competition to trumpet the $35.88 annual savings very soon.  

Intuit could easily have offered its online option free of charge. While that would cannibalize its packaged version, the overall impact to its bottom line would have been insignificant (note 2). And a free Quicken would have made it much harder for Mint, Wesabe, Geezeo, Buxfer and others to gain a footing (note 1).

My guess is that Intuit doesn't feel too threatened by the startups, yet. The security issue is extremely difficult for a new company to overcome. Intuit is one of the few tech companies with a brand that has trust levels on par with a financial institution. Millions already entrust their entire tax return, which has far more personal info than an online bank account, with the company. 

Intuit will allow the startups to build a following, then acquire the promising ones and convert their users to Quicken Online. All for less than the cash it would have foregone by offering Quicken Online free.  

We'll compare and contrast Quicken Online with the startups in an upcoming Online Banking Report (previous reports here and here).

Notes:

1. A few hours before Quicken Online went live, Mint issued a press release trumpeting its 100,000 registered users. That's an impressive number for a company that went live in September (previous coverage here). However, assuming 20% to 25% of those are active, there are still more than 500 times as many Quicken desktop users. 

2. Intuit's fiscal 2007 pre-tax profit was $670 million. 

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.

One of the biggest themes at our upcoming FINOVATE 2007: DEMOing the Future of Online Finance (here) is the interesting developments in the online personal finance space (see lineup below).

As we mentioned last week, the race to add personal financial management (PFM) features to online banking sites is just getting started. To some extent, every bank and credit union supporting online banking already offers extensive personal finance functionality. Think back on how the average person managed day-to-day finances prior to 1997: telephone calls, ATM slips, or in my case, the moment of terror once per month when opening the monthly bank statement.

But now that everyone offers base level PFM, the new race is to provide advanced features to hold on to customers, attract new ones, and potentially cross-sell complimentary products such as debt consolidation, mortgage refis, insurance and so on (see note 1). We also hope to see some fee income from the new features, either through elevated checking account fees, or with premium online banking surcharges (note 2). The latter appears unlikely to happen in the United States unless Bank of America starts charging fees.

At FINOVATE we'll see demos from five key players:

• Two industry veterans, both two-time OBR Best of the Web winners, will be launching significant new versions this fall: Digital Insight (Intuit) and Yodlee
• Two "class of 2007" new startups: Jwaala (coverage here) and Mint (coverage here)
• And Geezeo, which recently changed its name and moved aggressively into personal finance (coverage here)

Digital Insight (Intuit)
One of the most intriguing acquisitions in online banking in the past ten years was Intuit's purchase last year of online banking platform provider Digital Insight (see coverage here and here). Everyone expected the merged companies to push hard on personal finance, the core of Intuit's much-admired brand. I've had a chance to see the Personal FinanceWorks and Small Business FinanceWorks demos several times and came away impressed. Combined with the depth of Digital Insight's client base, these products have a chance to become the online banking standard within a few years. Intuit is a two-time OBR Best of the Web winner with its Web-based tax services.

Yodlee
Yodlee used to be known as "that account aggregation company." But over the years they've worked hard to shed that image and morph into a full-service financial tools provider. The company offers account-opening tools, bill payment services, personal financial management, long-term archives, and, yes, account aggregation, although it's now more integrated with the company's other services, especially its MoneyCenter personal financial manager. MoneyCenter is the engine behind Bank of America's MyPortfolio which helped Yodlee win its second OBR Best of the Web (see coverage here).    

Notes:

1. For more info on online personal finance, see Online Banking Report #132/133 and #142/143.

2. For more info on premium online banking pricing, see Online Banking Report #109.

You know you have it made when your company becomes a verb. Everyone on the planet knows about Googling. Then there is MapQuesting directions to the party, Yelping the best Thai food South of Market, and in financial services, Zillowing the house down the street. Someday, you may Wesabe your wireless provider to see how much users spend there and how they rate the experience.  

At least that would fit the vision of Wesabe co-founder and CEO Jason Knight, who I caught up with over coffee yesterday in Seattle as I was putting the finishing touches on a report on Wesabe and other so-called "social personal finance" companies (note 1).

I came away with a new respect for what Wesabe is trying to do. They are not so much looking to be a Web-based Quicken, as I assumed; but more a Quicken/Google mashup, delivering consumer insights by finding meaning in millions of consumer purchases. Overall, it's more like what Google does with a billion Web pages, than what Quicken does with a few thousand transactions (for each user). 

But unlike Google, which can crawl websites at will, Wesabe must convince consumers to open up their spending files to the equivalent of a search engine crawl. To do that, Jason says that Wesabe "must make financial information interesting (to its users)" while also making it drop-dead simple to upload data to Wesabe.  

No easy task. But Wesabe seems to have a head start on making that happen. More on that in our full report (see note below).

Note:

1. Our next Online Banking Report, Social Personal Finance, will look at the entire sector. You'll find it here next week. It will include a detailed look at Wesabe and Lending Club, which is catering entirely to Facebook users (see post here), and what banks should do to compete and/or partner with this new type of financial provider.

At WBR's Net.Finance conference yesterday, Jon Kaplan, head of Google's Financial Services Group, showcased ways to work with Google that were NOT related to search. He showed some cool and free ways to showcase your brand on Google Earth, Google Gadgets, Google Calendar, and more. We'll look at those in future posts, but by far the most entertaining example is Intuit's refreshingly creative TurboTax Rap promotion.

The company sponsored a contest that ended on the traditional U.S. tax day, April 15, that offered a top prize of $25,000 to the best YouTube video featuring TurboTax. Intuit also gave the first runner-up $5,000 and the third place video $1,000. And anyone who uploaded a video entry received a free copy of TurboTax. Intuit hired 1980's rapper Vanilla Ice to do the intro and announce the winner.  

To promote the contest, Intuit created a special-purpose website (see screenshot below) and built a YouTube page (see below). The winning entry, showcased on Intuit's YouTube page, has more than 250,000 views. That's enough to put it on YouTube's most-viewed page (currently, it's number 13 on this week's most viewed), which really turbocharges the viewership. In comparison, the two runner-ups have less than 9,000 views.

This is brilliant work by Intuit. Although it was a costly promotion, it was still less than a major print buy and more importantly, it introduced the TurboTax brand to a whole new group of younger customers who'll be buying tax software for many decades. It will be interesting to see if Intuit makes this an annual event.

YouTube page  <youtube.com/thetaxrap>

Website home <turbotax.intuit.com/taxrap>

Intuit's $1.3 billion acquisition of Digital Insight closed yesterday, marking the beginning of a new era of innovation in small business online banking (previous coverage here). It's a market that's been underserved for years (see Online Banking Report's, Small- and Microbusiness Online Banking, #107/108).

Intuit, which has iPod-like domination of small business accounting and bookkeeping via Quicken and QuickBooks, can now leverage the software relationship into the banking relationship.  The bloggers at Intuit's QuickBooks team-blog expanded on that theme here, discussing their goal of integrating electronic invoicing and payments into the bank site:

Why the purchase? One reason is to try to sell functionality of our record-keeping software as a service through banks, letting small businesses create, send, and get paid for invoices, all online at a bank's site. With millions of QuickBooks customers, we think we have some insight into small business' needs.... We learned from our tax return business how quickly packaged software can move to a Web service. Last year, for the first time, more people used the online version of our Turbo Tax Web service than the desktop version.

This is not necessarily bad for financial institutions. In fact, it probably levels the playing field for the smaller banks and credit unions that are the core of the DI client base. Through integration into Intuit's accounting products, smaller banks will be able to offer sophisticated small business solutions that equal or surpass what Bank of America or Wells Fargo offers today.

Intuit's bold move to purchase online banking pioneer Digital Insight came as a surprise, both to analysts and shareholders. Reactions were mixed, with shares drifting downward after the 8 AM EST announcement Thursday, ending the week off 3% (see chart here; Intuit presentation on the acquisition here).

Although the software developer has made a few forays into selling bank technology, including owning a bill payment processor in the mid-90s, it has generally stayed focused on packaged software for consumers and small businesses.

Just two weeks ago, I met with Intuit execs at the coming out party for its financial institution services unit at the China Grill down the hall from BAI's Retail Delivery Conference in Las Vegas. They were excited about several new services built on the Teknowledge unit purchased last year (see previous post here).

Analysis
Only time will tell whether the acquisition makes sense for Intuit. It's a savvy company that understands the personal finance space as well as anyone, so I tend to believe they know what they are doing.

Regardless of what it does for Intuit's share price, the merger is bound to shake up the online banking product offerings at banks and credit unions, especially for smaller businesses, the Quicken and QuickBooks crowd.

In September, we published a report predicting significant growth in personal finance functionality in online banking services (see Note 1). This merger should further accelerate that growth. As Intuit integrates Quicken, TurboTax, and QuickBooks features into the Digital Insight line, other platform providers will feel pressured to keep up.

This is good news for U.S. consumers who've generally NOT been able to enjoy the benefits of tightly integrated personal finance and online banking.

End Notes:

(1) See Online Banking Report #130/131, Personal Finance Features for Online Banking: Why MySpendingReport Trumps Free Bill Pay

"The biggest profit center at banks is customer ignorance, which banks have mistaken for customer loyalty."
-- Gary Hamel, speaking to 1,000+ bankers at BAI's Retail Delivery Conference, Nov. 15, 2006

I've always been a sucker for management-guru speakers. I can still remember Tom Peters speaking at a sold-out show in Peoria, Illinois, back when I was a wet-behind-the-ears management-trainee for Caterpillar. It was 20 years ago during the height of "In Search of Excellence" mania and it helped me realize a lot can be done to improve business performance.

So every year I make it a point to sit up front when BAI trots out the guru-du-jour to inspire the banking crowd. This year, it was Gary Hamel, a Harvard guy that, I'm sorry to say, I hadn't heard of prior to Wednesday (see the End Note for a summary of his recommendations presented to the BAI crowd).

But man did he grab my attention with his challenge to the assembled bankers and tech-company reps (see quote above). He believes banks are vulnerable as customers become better equipped to compare the price of various financial services, a natural role of the Internet.

The importance of switching tools
Hamel believes financial services loyalty will disappear once customers discover how easy it is to move their accounts to pick up a hundred basis points on their savings rate, or avoid $35 overdraft fees.

In his BAI presentation, Hamel pointed to U.K.-based uSwitch <uswitch.com> as an example of a new tool to help financial customers compare and switch banking accounts (we'll profile it in an upcoming article).

As Hamel was delivering his keynote, Intuit was busy in a nearby Mandalay Bay eatery briefing analysts on its new account switching service, scheduled to go live December 15. The clever service is built on the Teknowledge aggregation engine acquired last year (data sheet here). Intuit's service is similar to Yodlee's service announced in September (see our coverage here). We'll be covering it in more detail as it goes live. 

End Note:

Hamel's management philosophy
I have yet to read Hamel's books, but what he talked about Wednesday could be boiled down to the following:

• Employees shouldn't be "managed" they should be "led."
• In practice, he'd like to see nearly all management eliminated and replaced by small, self-managed teams working to achieve company goals.
• As much as possible, teams would make their own product, pricing, and staffing decisions.
• Compensation would be highly dependent on the team's results in achieving the ambitious profit goals set for them by the company.
• His examples: Whole Foods, W.L. Gore, and Google.      

Step 1: It's tax time
Step 2: Then it's play time

So starts one of the most interesting financial services websites to come along in a long time. Leave it to Intuit to come up with a way to make submitting your tax return seem almost fun. It's RockYourRefund.com website is basically a jazzed up portal into TurboTax for the Web, a service that's been around for more than five years.

Analysis
Sometimes it seems futile trying to make boring financial services interesting. Well if Intuit can do it with tax prep, you can do it with your financial products.

Take a minute to look at it yourself, but the premise is you get a 10% coupon at Best Buy or up to $200 off a trip after you've completed your tax return online via the TurboTax website. Cost for the online service is $5.95 for federal plus $9.95 for state tax returns.

Action Item
This approach would work wonderfully with bill payment. Offer coupons and offers that users would receive after paying their bills. A benefit for saving time and money using your super-convenient epayment service. (For more information on how to build a killer bill payment service, see Online Banking Report #80, 81, 82, 86, and an update on the market in #115 published three days ago. )

-- JB

Looking for ideas to appeal to the Quicken segment? Personal Mvelopes, an online personal financial management system from In2m Corporation, stitches together account aggregation and bill payment into a $9.95 per month offering.

Analysis
The company has recently attracted some good PR (Kiplinger's, Boston Globe, BankRate.com) that may translate into some accounts. But unless In2m partners with stronger financial brands, the finance site will struggle to attract paying customers.

Consumers are wary, make that VERY WARY, of online financial services offerings, especially from unknown entities. But if a bank were to license the system and operate it under its own name, it might become moderately successful. (We say moderately, because budgeting is not a mainstream activity, and many of the budget-minded are already locked in to using Quicken or Money.)

If nothing else, the system demonstrates good customer advocacy. The bank could bundle additional services, such as long-term transaction archives, to help justify the $10 per month. Also, bundled revolving credit could boost the business case substantially.

If you'd like to learn more about the how personal finance is penetrating online banking, check out Personal Finance Features for Online Banking: Why “My Spending Report” trumps free bill pay on the subject from our sister publication, the Online Banking Report.

Following are some of the better emails we’ve seen from financial providers in recent months. Because we only see those from financial institutions where we have established relationships, we would appreciate seeing others you’ve received. Send them to: info@onlinebankingreport.com .

Wells Fargo/ShareBuilder

This is our favorite holiday email. It was marketing NetStock’s ShareBuilder on behalf of co-branding partner Wells Fargo. It was sent the week after Thanksgiving (Nov. 28) and featured a engaging graphic of a young child and just 32 words of text (not including the mousetype fine print).

The pitch was for starting ShareBuilder accounts for children, with a $25 bonus for accounts opened prior to Dec. 31. A unique, if somewhat complicated, holiday gift idea for parents and grandparents.

First USA

This is a good example of a simple old-fashioned holiday greeting. FirstUSA punched it out on Christmas Eve and included a well-crafted P.S., “Maximize your holiday time by managing your accounts online at: Cardmemberservices.firstusa.com.

PayPal

PayPal sent several emails during the holiday period promoting a usage sweepstakes that rewarded users for shopping with PayPal. Taking a page from Visa’s annual holiday promotion , winners received their PayPal purchase free of charge. This message kicked off the program on Nov. 30.

PayPal also provided shopping ideas and a link to a directory of PayPal shops (right-hand side of the screen). The look of the emails was crisp and clean like the company’s Web site, but we would have preferred a bit more holiday cheer in the graphics.

DeepGreen Bank

DeepGreen Bank sent this message on Dec. 10 promoting holiday usage of its Home Equity Line of Credit. The message was pretty straightforward and was signed by DeepGreen CEO Jerome Selitto.

It’s a good email overall, but it’s a bit boring. The usual, great rates, great convenience, yada, yada, yada. To increase readership, it would be better to put some of the info into eye-catching graphics.

The company made a serious error by not putting DeepGreen in either the email subject or sender field. Unless you know the CEO, it looks a lot like a SPAM until you open it.

Intuit’s Quicken.com

We received our first holiday email from Intuit on Nov. 15, with a message entitled, “Holiday Gift and Sending Guide.”  The message had the usual format of Intuit’s monthly Money Matters email letter, with no holiday graphics. Beside the spending and gift advice, it featured a fifth anniversary sweeps for NetBank.

Although much of the advice is boilerplate, we like how it positions Quicken.com as a provider of thorough and timely advice about all aspects of your financial situation.

Normally, we don’t like to see outside advertising, but the NetBank sweeps added interest to the message.

NextCard

The December installment of NextCard’s monthly email newsletter was full of shopping discounts. The full newsletter was a bit cluttered taking up about four screens (at 800x600 on a 19-inch monitor).

The newsletter also promoted the Visa Magic Moments sweepstakes that awarded cardholders free purchases at a randomly selected second every day (box on the right).

To help differentiate its message from in-box SPAM, NextCard incorporates the cardholder’s first name in the email subject field.

Intuit appears to be as close as anyone in creating the first popular Web-based financial supermarket. Looking at the Web traffic across its various domains, you get a sense of the company’s broad appeal in tax services, bill payment, insurance, loans, stock quotes, and most recently statement aggregation (screenshot below).

When it comes to online financial services, Intuit has most of the bases covered including its newest feature, MyAccounts statement aggregation.

Traffic at Intuit Web Sites

millions of unique users¹

Source:  PC Data Online www.pcdataonline.com 

¹Includes duplicate users across various Intuit Web sites

Intuit Cashfinder

www.cashfinder.com

Intuit shuttered its Business Cashfinder Web site after just a year in business (see OBR, 6/98) . Repeated calls to the company were unreturned which is unusual for Intuit who we’ve always found to be very accessible. We speculate there were two problems:

•  low usage due to its convoluted process application process
•  channel conflict with the 31 financial institutions supporting QuickBooks, which had an imbedded link to CashFinder (OBR 9/98)

Intuit

Eric Dunn, CTO
Nancy Tubbs, Product Manager, Interactive Billing
2525 Garcia Avenue
Mountain View, CA94039-7850
(650) 944-3037
www.intuit.com

Electronic Bill Pay Volume:
The estimated 3 million payments per month (plus/minus 25%) from Quicken, QuickBooks, and soon Quicken.com users, are processed by Checkfree and included in Checkfree’s total volume; Intuit owns 19.1% of Checkfree.

Claim to Fame: The top brand in PC-based financial management, and arguably the number one personal finance brand on the Web.

Status Report: Intuit continues its industry dominance with a 60% market share of electronic tax filings (OBR 2/99); 70+% share of PFM users; 75% share of the small biz accounting software market (OBR 9/98); estimated 15% share of the U.S. bill payment market; and leading personal finance Web site, Quicken.com.

Bill Presentment Plans:

•  The company first put a bill presentment module in Quicken 98, but has only had one biller using it, Florida Light & Power, www.fpl.com
•  More importantly, Quicken.com was slated to begin offering ebilling in first quarter 1999. Intuit has established a price of zero for billers presenting bills via standard OFX format, provided the biller agrees not to charge the user for the service.
•  One biller is in bill presentment trials using QuickBooks.

We visited the largest search/portal sites at the end of September to see who was advertising what for users seeking information on business loans.* We were surprised to find the search term sparsely used by financial services companies. The only advertisers were The Lending Tree pitching its online loan auction service at Infoseek and Excite; Intuit promoting CashFinder.com and Quicken on Infoseek; Capital One hawking a 9.9% credit card on Yahoo, and ConsumerInfo.com with a small buy at Infoseek.

Source: Online Banking Report, 9/30/98 *Methodology: We searched on the term “business loan” (parenthesis included) at each of the sites from a Seattle Netcom POP. We hit reload 10 times to measure how often banners were presented. This is only an approximate measure of banner advertising. Time of day, geogrpahic location, and user profile could all impact which banners are presented.