Last week, we looked at how Square makes a single webpage look great across various mobile platforms. Today, we look at the exact opposite problem. How to showcase your various mobile apps on a single webpage. 

Pageonce does it as well as we've seen, using a single showcase panel that includes all five of its mobile app platforms across the top: iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows. Users can scroll horizontally to see two sets of screenshots for each platform.

The company also includes version number, date of the last update, and app size in the lower right corner. And of course, there's a link to download the appropriate marketplace to download the app. The Android page uses a QR code instead of a link.

In other news, Pageonce added bill payment to its iPhone and Android app today, moving ahead of Mint in the features arm race. The new Gold service, which we haven't tested yet, is priced at $4.99/mo, good news for fee-starved online financial providers. Mint says it has bill payment coming too. It will be interesting to see if they put a fee on it.

Relevance for Netbankers: The addition of transactional services such as bill payment makes third-party PFMs, or virtual banks such as BankSimple, bigger threats to mainstream banks and credit unions. As uber-consultant Richard Crone always says, "He who enrolls, controls."

-------------------------- 

Pageonce iPhone app

iPad

Android

BlackBerry

Windows

---------------------

Note: We cover mobile banking and payments periodically in our Online Banking Report (subscription).

To my knowledge, ING Direct is the only major U.S. bank blocking third-party PFM access. But users can direct their PFM around the gate with a special "read-only" access code.

How it works
It's not particularly easy to find, buried three levels deep in MyAccounts | Preferences | Access Code.

The default setting is Blocked, as you can see in the first screenshot below.

But once you find the page, it couldn't be simpler to set up. Simply press the blue Create Access Code button in the upper right, and in a split second, you have created a read-only access code and opened your account to PFM access.

To change back, you merely click the "Block" button in upper right.

The only thing missing is an explanation of what to do with the Access Code. Is it the username or password? While that's explained in an link from the first page, it's not on the second page where you need it. (BTW, it's the password).

The bank also confirmed the new code via email right away (third screenshot).

-----------------------------------------------------

Access code main page (20 Oct 2011)

New access code

Email confirmation

----------------------------------

Note: OBR subscribers can access our previous reports on security at OnlineBankingReport.com (published in 1999, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2008).

Healthcare expense management continues to be a pain-point for most consumers. Today, Cake Health launched a "Mint for healthcare" which uses similar technology to automatically download healthcare transactions and use the data to manage insurance reimbursements and other aspects of healthcare.  

The company also launched a mobile app that syncs with the desktop version and uses the camera to upload documentation to the system (screenshot below). The startup impressed the expert panel at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it launched today. 

It's hard to believe that Mint turns four next month. It made its financial industry debut at our first Finovate conference (demo here, Oct. 2, 2007) after having launched to the general public a few weeks earlier.

With 5 million registered users, and public ownership (Intuit), it's now "the establishment" that dozens of startups look to unseat.

Mint made a large stride forward this week with the addition of a bill-due-date timeline to its Overview page, the page that users land on after login (see inset and first screenshot below).

The company also expanded its text and email bill-due-date reminder system. A wizard launched from a promotion on Mint's main page (screenshot 2, 3) prompts users to establish reminders for regular household bills.

Bottom line: Mint's billing timeline is a good example of the forward-looking approach that's much needed in online and mobile banking.

-----------------------------------------

A timeline of upcoming bills has been added to the Mint.com's main Overview page (25 Aug. 2011)

Mint promotes the new feature with a huge interactive banner on the main  Overview page

In this pop-up box, Mint gathers together likely bills and asks if you want a reminder

A timeline of upcoming bills has been added to the main overview page

------

Note: For more on online personal financial management (OFM), see Online Banking Report (published May 2010).

I've always been a bit obsessive about the weather. I blame it on my Iowa roots, where the economy ebbs and flows depending on the rain and sunshine, and where you have just about every type of weather condition, sometimes in the same day.

One of the main reasons I wanted an iPhone back in 2007 (in the days before the App Store and mobile banking), was to get a weather button in my pocket 24/7. But it wasn't until today I realized that weather info is a decent metaphor for where remote banking is headed.

Think about the weather displayed on your mobile or PC. You get some pretty good info about what's going to happen today, plus decent estimates on the next few days, followed by a SWAG on what might happen a week or two out. This is helpful for planning your clothes, weekend activities, and as a last resort, for making conversation (sorry family).

This is exactly what's needed in online banking, a FORECAST of your finances. You need to know exactly where you stand today, plus you need an accurate prediction of your cash flows for the rest of the week based on pre-scheduled payments, followed by reasonable estimates of how things stand for the next month based on historical income and expenses. 

Most of the major PFMs are incorporating forward-looking views into their interfaces. It's probably THE most important missing element in today's online banking. A financial forecast should be shown right next to the current balance on the main account page.

Bottom line: It's not a perfect analogy. It's still important to track historical spending to look for waste, fraud, and opportunities to save (note 1). But consumers need help understanding their financial position going forward. So crunch the numbers for them and let your customers get back to their mobile entertainment, even if it's checking the weather in Yakutsk (notes 2, 3).

---------

Notes:
1. And you can help with that too; see BillGuard post.
2. Yakutsk, Russia, is the coldest city you can track on the iPhone (hat tip to my nephew Marcus).
3. And yes, that's an actual image stored on my iPhone. I don't make these things up.
4. For more on online personal financial management (OFM), see Online Banking Report (published May 2010). 

There are three huge usability challenges with online personal financial management (PFM):

• It's hard to get started
• It's a pain to keep up with tagging transactions to make the data meaningful
• It can be disconcerting for many users to view spending summaries

That's why so few Americans engage in PFM, despite its obvious benefits (note 1). One way to tackle the first problem: Offer a sweepstakes or bonus to induce trial.

Truliant FCU is doing that with a late-summer sweeps encouraging members to log in and give its FinanceWorks (powered by Intuit's Quicken) program a try. Members who sign up for the PFM between July 6 and Sept. 29 are automatically entered into the sweeps. There is no cost for the service (note 2).

Prizes include:

• $100 awarded each week
• iPad 2 awarded each month

Total value of the prizes is about $3,000.

----------------------------------------------------------

Truliant FCU PFM sweeps (11 Aug. 2011)

------
Notes:
1. For more on online personal financial management (OFM), see Online Banking Report (published May 2010).  
2. We urge FIs to consider charging for value-added services such as online PFM. See our recent Online Banking Report, Creating Fee-Based Online & Mobile Banking Services (published May 2011) for the rationale.

Fintech made a good showing at TechCrunch's semi-annual Disrupt conference in NYC. Of 32 startups that launched on stage, three were financial-related:

• Spenz: A mobile PFM (Disrupt demo)
• InvoiceASAP: A mobile invoicing app with accounting integration (Disrupt demo)
• BillGuard: A transaction-monitoring service (Disrupt demo)

And both InvoiceASAP and BillGuard (discussed below) were selected to come back on the third day and compete, along with four other startups, for the top prize in front of an all-star panel of judges. The judges selected BillGuard runner-up behind GetAround, a clever peer-to-peer car rental service which wowed the crowd, also taking home the People's Choice award. _____________________________________________________________________________

BillGuard overview
_____________________________________________________________________________

The TechCrunch judges and analysts went gaga over BillGuard. Everyone wanted to use the service, and most wanted to invest in the company.

However, the company recently landed a $3 million Series A round (February 2011), so they'll have to wait. Investors include: Bessemer Venture Partners, Chris Dixon, Ron Conway, IA Ventures, Howard Lindzon and Yaron Galai. The Israeli company has 12 employees. The founders are Yaron Samid, CEO, and Raphael Ouzan, CTO.

Currently, BillGuard is free for the first card and can be upgraded to monitor an unlimited number of cards for $4/mo, a classic freemium model.

In the two days following the company's Monday launch, users added 10,000 cards to the alerting service. In the initial scans, looking back through 30 days of transactions, the company identified potential nuisance charges on 20% of the cards analyzed. The flagged transactions ranged in value from $2 to $6,000 with the latter described as "fraud on a very wealthy person's card." ______________________________________________________________________________

How it works
_____________________________________________________________________________

1. Register at the site with just your email address and ZIP code

2. Enter your username and password for a credit card account into the Yodlee-powered aggregation engine

3. The past 30 days of transactions are immediately downloaded and analyzed for potentially fraudulent or unwanted charges (see screenshot 2)

4. Charges are color-coded by risk assessment (green = good, orange = review, red = flagged) (see screenshot 3). Much like anti-virus companies, BillGuard relies on its user base (crowdsourcing) to identify nuisance and fraudulent charges.

5. You can quickly call up the "reviewable" transactions and choose to mark them "good" or wait for more information on the merchant from BillGuard and its user base (screenshot _______________________________________________________________________________

Analysis
_______________________________________________________________________________

In my case, the service did not find any bad transactions in the 85 it reviewed from my primary business and personal credit cards. All seven marked "unsure" were fine. None were flagged red.

But according to the company, the average American loses $300 per year in unwanted charges, and I'm way over that. Just last year, I lost more than $1,000 because I had the wrong plan on my mobile phone. But that was a legitimate charge from an existing merchant of mine. BillGuard doesn't guard against stupidity, yet, but it wouldn't take a whole lot more intelligence to start flagging this type of out-of-bounds charge as well.

The potential for financial safeguard services is huge. Just look at the multi-billion credit-monitoring industry, or Mint.com for that matter which alerts users to bank fees and keeps a running total. The question isn't whether consumers want this type of protection, certainly they do. The issue is whether anyone will take the time to set up the service, pay for it, and then take the time to monitor their accounts.

BillGuard knows that and is actively pursuing deals with large banks to package the service into online banking. In its Monday demo, the company said it was in talks with three top-ten banks (on Wednesday they said, "Make that 4").

Distributing BillGuard would be a mixed blessing for banks. Earlier detection of fraud would be useful, but the labor involved in working through increased dispute resolution, especially false positives, would have to be factored in. But again, BillGuard understands the dilemma and is developing dispute-resolution capabilities that will SAVE issuers time and money.

I predict we'll be seeing a lot more from this company so keep them on your radar. I know we will.  

----------------------------------------

1. Welcome screen after first download & scan (26 May 2011)

2. Initial scan results with 7 transactions marked "review"

3. Transactions are color-coded by risk assessment

4. The transaction review page

5. TechCrunch finalist demo (click to watch on TechCrunch site; )

---------------------------

Note: For more on online personal financial management (OFM/PFM), see our Online Banking Report.

Internet-enabling every service and device on the planet creates fascinating new business opportunities. And we are seeing our share of them in the fintech space (note 1). Knowing how to deliver the proper blend of personal service and automation is an area of extreme importance to financial institutions: The optimal solution varies by customer, by product, and even by time of day.

One relatively neglected area involves premium services that offer state-of-the-art tech married to specialized human service, for a fee. Large banks have private banking departments that handle the bills and day-to-day finances of households with millions in assets. But those that fall outside the private banking threshold are generally offered free, self-service tools available to everyone.

Back when only 10% to 20% of households were online, that distinction was necessary. But now that 60% to 70% or even more of a bank's households use the Internet, there are enough customers to slice and dice financial management services into a variety of offerings and price points. There's a lot of revenue available for service offerings in the wide range between free and private banking.

Enter the newest player in high-end bill payment: Balance Financial, an angel-funded company based in Seattle that launched its new service this week. CEO Devin Miller was also involved in the launch of one of our favorites new services of 2010, Finsphere's PinPoint mobile location-aware fraud-alert service (previous post).

___________________________________________________________________

How it works
_______________________________________________________________

Balance is a unique mixture of automatic bill pay and human bookkeeper, with an online PFM thrown in to help keep track of it all. The company has built a rich PFM, added billpay powered by Online Resources, and given each customer their very own actual person who oversees the account.

Unlike previous generations of billpay and the scan-and-pay offerings from PayTrust and others, Balance Financial does everything for you. It receives the printed or electronic billing statement, it uploads the docs to its website, and then the most important piece, it pays the bills automatically based on your prior instructions, just like the private banking officer. The end user is only contacted if the bill falls outside the preexisting parameters.

Sound too good to be true? Maybe, if it were free, but it's far from it. The company tested a variety of pricing options and settled on a price that's borderline ridiculous for the retail banking mindset: $75 per month.

___________________________________________________________________

Analysis
______________________________________________________________

Are they crazy? Maybe, but probably not. The company has been delivering personal bookkeeping services for seven years, and has paid more than 100,000 bills for its clients (note 3). It knows from experience there are affluent households and small businesses that are happy to offload this task for much more than $75 per month. When paying larger bills, the late fees alone can easily be in this range (note 2).

Balance admits the audience for $75/mo is tiny. But as its technology gets better, and its bookkeepers can take on bigger client loads, it believes it can push this price down, maybe even way down. So if you are interested in finding a new way to serve your mass affluents with something they can't get anywhere else, take a look at Balance.

Balance Financial integrates the human side throughout the Web-based app (3 March 2011)

--------------------------------

Notes:

1. From the look of the applications for the upcoming FinovateSpring, the number of startups is growing at an even faster pace.
2. Our record penalty for paying a bill late at our business is $1,100. We'd just made a huge charge and by being that one day late, our APR was bounced to 25%, and we went into revolving mode over two cycles. Even though we paid the balance off within 7 days of making the charge, it still cost $700 one month and $400 the next. Anyway, that one incident alone would pay for Balance for 1.25 years, not to mention avoiding the huge frustration of making a thousand-dollar blunder.
3. The original bookkeeping service was founded in 2004, by Devin's wife, Rebecca Miller.
4. For more on online personal financial management (OFM/PFM), see our Online Banking Report.

Manilla, a new account aggregation service from Hearst Corporation, launched today at Demo. Here's the official announcement and its demo video is embedded below.

Manilla currently aggregates accounts in four categories (more are on the way):

• Household for keeping track of bills
• Finance for keeping track of bank accounts and credit cards
• Subscriptions for keeping track of magazine subscriptions
• Travel for tracking mileage programs

In the first screenshot below, I've added an account in the finance category (American Express, which is shown as pending) and one in the travel section (American Airlines, which displayed the account balance immediately). I have yet to add a household bill or a magazine subscription.

In the second screenshot, you can see what it will look like after the account has been populated with many accounts (this is an example directly from the Manilla website).

The service will not show third-party advertising. Like Doxo, it will display marketing messages only from participating billers. And also like Doxo, billers will pay the freight, sending the company a small fee for each electronic bill it sends through Manilla (more on its business model here).

Analysis
As I've mentioned in several posts about Doxo, there is a huge need for a secure, easy-to-use hub to help households organize their bills and statements. While Doxo is currently focused on delivering bills only from participating billers, Manilla allows users to aggregate bills and statements from virtually anyone supported by its Yodlee-powered aggregation engine.

So, if you are willing to sit down and enter usernames and passwords, the service can begin delivering value immediately. Consumers have been reluctant to do that unless they trust the company. But with Hearst Corp. backing it and with the credibility of two major billing partners, Comcast and Citibank, Manilla may be able to get over the trust hurdle.   

1. Initial Manilla homepage prompts new users to add accounts in four categories (28 Feb. 2011)

2. Manilla homepage after the user has set up accounts
Note: The icons are for bills, statements, notices and offers

3. Reminders area

Demo video (link)

------------------------------------------

Note:
For more info, see our recent reports: Paperless Billing and Banking and Email Banking: Revitalizing the Channel.

I was pleasantly surprised today to find that American Express has slipped basic PFM (personal financial management) functionality into its online card management area (note 1). The company allows the user to tag transactions and view results in graphical format (see screenshots below).

According to the FAQ, each transaction can have up to five tags. And each user can create up to 200 unique tags to apply to transactions.

Significance: Combined with the categories automatically assigned to each transaction, American Express is now offering basic PFM services. Although a little clunky--a three-click process is required to add a tag--it's a nice addition and something every online banking service should support. 

How it works
1. Click the "Add Tags to Transactions" link on the right side of the Statements & Activity area (below):

2. Select a transaction(s) and apply an existing tag or create a new one, then click the Apply Tag button (lower right):

How it looks
After apply the tag "Personal," it now shows up in the transaction listing:

Once tagged, users can view transactions by tag categories:

Or view graphs by tag:

Note:
1. The example shown is for a Business Gold account. I'm not sure how long it's been available. The first mention I could find about it via Google was Nov. 2010, so we'll go with that until someone chimes in with better info. 
2. For more on online personal financial management (OFM/PFM), see our Online Banking Report.

In what I believe is a first in the United States, a financial institution has begun charging a small fee for online personal financial management (PFM) services.

Portland, OR-based Unitus Community Credit Union, with 68,000 members and $800 million in assets, launched its new Geezeo-powered PFM Total Finance in late 2010. Members pay $2 per month for the service following a 30-day free trial.

According to Laurie Kresl, VP planning & biz development at Unitus, the CU has 661 members signed up for the service as of this week, or about 1% of its member base, which is a solid start considering the monthly fee is not mentioned on the public website, but is disclosed as members sign up for the service (note 1). 

Quick take: While online/mobile access will remain relatively fee-free, we'll begin to see more fees for optional value-added services such as advanced financial management. Congratulations to Unitus for taking the lead on this one.

Unitus CU homepage features its new PFM offering (6 Jan. 2011)

PFM landing page (link)

Note:
1. To sign up, customers first log in to online banking. The CU says it plans to add fine print to the landing page (above), disclosing the monthly fee.

Once upon a time, personal financial management (PFM) software was used only by those with complicated finances (usually with lots of business expenses to keep track of) or those who made a hobby out of tracking their money.

This was enough to support Intuit's Quicken, but every other software solution either lost money, remained small, or folded.

Then along came Web 2.0, and it looked like that might change. Dozens of online PFM providers launched, gained some early traction, then hit a wall, requiring them to fold (Wesabe, Rudder), re-focus on white labeling (Geezeo, Strands), or stay small. Only Mint.com (now owned by Intuit) was able to make it as a major PFM destination riding a wave of publicity generated by being a tech darling.

So where does that leave us now? There are several obvious opportunities for personal finance companies:

• Small businesses willing to pay for tools that save time and/or help them run their business better (Outright.com, Kashoo, Xero and many others)
• Tools that satisfy specific needs with almost immediate time savings (Expensify for expense reports)
• Tools that watch over your accounts to make sure you are not defrauded, cheated, or billed in error (in development at a number of companies)

And then there's the avenue that Bundle is working on:

• Using the aggregated data to provide spending insights for everyone

Bundle's new tools
This week, Finovate Fall Best of Show winner (video), Bundle, released two new tools under the tab, Everybody's Money (as opposed to the other option, My Money)

• Restaurant Recommender (see below)
• Move-O-Matic: Clever name and revamped interface for a feature Bundle has been delivering since it launched a year ago (previous post) that provides spending comparisons between various cities (see note 1)
• Restaurant Recommender is brilliant and could be a useful tool for anyone who eats out often (a much, much bigger audience than those that track their spending closely). It only works for NYC and LA right now, but more cities are in the plans.

Here's how it works:

• Type in a restaurant name (I chose Balthazar, a place my parents treated me to on a recent birthday; see first screenshot)
• Click the green Find Restaurants button
• Bundle returns a list of other restaurants that Balthazar customers frequent, complete with a "loyalty score" that quantifies how much customers spend at each restaurant along with a confidence measure on the recommendation (second screenshot)

And because the startup uses actual spending data from 20 million cards in its algorithm, the recommendations are based on real data, not the sometimes biased results of online review and popularity sites. As Bundle puts it, users "vote with their dollars."

If Bundle and Yelp make APIs available, it would be great to see a mashup of Yelp reviews augmented with Bundle spending data. And it's yet to be seen if they can convert casual drive-by data traffic into hardcore PFM users. But for now, Bundle is a great discovery tool, if you live in NYC or LA.

Bundle Restaurant Recommender (16 Dec. 2010)

Results for NYC search on "Balthazar"
Note: Bundle increased the transparency of the recommendation by disclosing how many transactions were used to derive the correlation. In the case of the Balthazar Bakery, the choice was based on more than 87,000 transactions. Bundle also provide a measure of how confident they are in the recommendation (the blue bar). 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes:
1. Regarding Move-O-Matic. Here's my original footnote followed by the correction (in italics):
Unfortunately, when you drill into the data, the results sometimes seem strange. Does anyone really think the highest income folks ($125k+) in NYC really spend $230 less per month than those in Seattle excluding housing costs (see inset)? Granted, we spend a lot more on coffee; still, not sure I buy this result.
(Update 17 Dec. 2010: Looks like this was user error in part aided by the tool's autofill which suggested NYC, which includes all 5 boroughs, when I typed N. If I'd have input "Manhattan" instead of NYC the results would be much different. The tool says I spend $1,500 more per month in Manhattan, that sounds much more realistic. My apologies.)
2. Bundle is backed by Citibank, Microsoft, and Morningstar
3. See Xero at FinovateEurope, Feb. 1.
4. For more on online personal financial management (OFM), see our recent Online Banking Report.

While full-functioned personal financial management (PFM) has its strategic advantages, the truth is that most consumers will never use a financial tool that takes longer than the length of a YouTube video to figure out (note 1).

That's why I'm a big fan of what Wells Fargo has done with My Spending Report, a drop-dead simple method for periodically seeing how out-of-control your spending is. All you do is click on the appropriate tab within online banking and bang, you are instantly looking at a pre-categorized spending analysis. Let's call it one-click PFM.

ATM Cash Tracker (press release), the newest tool from the bank, is similarly simple to set up and use. Although it's initially designed for ATM users, the concept would work well online and even better via a mobile app.

Wells customers can add a Cash Tracker button to their personalized ATM menu (see first screenshot). When selected, the new tool will reveal the total cash withdrawn during the current month along with the average during the past 12 months. It tracks only cash withdrawn from Wells Fargo ATMs. 

That's a great ATM innovation, but it will be even better when extended to mobile/online and applied to all cash use. As soon as I take money out of any machine (not just Wells Fargo) or receive cash back at the POS, my total cash use should be reflected on an online/mobile widget along with historical comparison. And users should have the option to tag the cash with spending categories to help assign it to the proper My Spending Report bucket.

And for users opting for emailed ATM receipts instead of paper ones (note 2), the Cash Tracker totals could be added to the virtual receipt (see second screenshot).

Wells Fargo personalized ATM menu
Note: New ATM Cash Finder not shown

Wells Fargo customers can choose to have their ATM receipt emailed
Note: Option E (below) allows users to hide their account balance from showing on the ATM screen.

-------------------------

Notes:
1. And I'm one of those people, so this is not meant to be a condescending remark. Just a fact.  
2. Wells Fargo released the ATM e-receipt option in June (press release)
3. Photo credit: Colin/thetruthabout
4. For more on online personal financial management (OFM), see our recent Online Banking Report. 

HelloWallet, an online personal financial management (OFM/PFM) provider that launched in March, sent customers an email today (second screenshot below) announcing several product enhancements including:

• To-Do List: Added to the dashboard to help you keep track of upcoming bills, goal progress, new savings ideas and so on. Users can manually add any item and receive email reminders. 
• Progress Charts: Helps monitor progress on savings and debt-reduction goals.
• Split Transactions: Ability to split transactions into two or more budget categories.
• More Deals: My Deals database expanded to more than 130,000 financial products.

These are solid enhancements and signal that HelloWallet will be a viable competitor in the OFM/PFM space (see previous post; note 1). I especially like the To-Do list, a relatively simple enhancement that helps increase the utility of the application. The company has attracted a steady flow of visitors, averaging about 25,000 unique visitors per month in May and June (see Compete chart below).

HelloWallet.com traffic estimates (U.S. only)

Source: Compete (link)

But the main reason for today's post is to highlight the design of HelloWallet's new blog at <hellowallet.com/blog>. The layout is visually appealing, incorporates social media sharing tools (Facebook, Twitter, RSS), and does a great job showcasing the company's Twitter updates in the right-hand column (see first screenshot). This gives the whole blog a vibrant, up-to-the-minute feel, without burdening readers (and staff writers) with too many blog entries.

So far in July, HelloWallet posted four blog entries and tweeted 53 times (2x per day), a good pace. Both the blog posts and Tweets contain a good mix of personal finance material, general info, and company news. 

HelloWallet blog front page (link; 26 July 2010)

Email message announcing new features (26 July 2010)

Note:
1. For more on the OFM/PFM market, see our recent Online Banking Report. 

Some of the best innovations come from inventors that develop a solution to a personal pet peeve, then commercialize it. In financial service, Aaron Patzer has told the story many times about how he developed Mint to solve his own needs for a better financial management tool.

If I had Aaron Patzer's drive, or funds, I'd be working on a solution to digitize point-of-sale receipts. In our household, none of us can keep track of a receipt past the first 24 hours. Someone or some thing must come into our house during the night and make off with all paper receipts.

So when it comes to returning something to a store, we usually end up replaying this sad process:

1. Try to remember where the receipt is
2. Look for it
3. Ask spouse if they've seen it
4. Look again
5. Curse bad memory (of spouse) and give up for the day
6. Repeat above steps the next day
7. Curse bad memory (of self and spouse) and give up for good
8. Rehearse story to tell store on why you don't have receipt
9. Return item to store without receipt
10. Receive gift card instead of cash refund (because there's no receipt)
11. Forget/lose gift card
12. Curse paper receipts and vow to better organized

That's why I was excited to hear Square founder Jack Dorsey tell the audience at NACHA Payments in April that one of startup's key strategies was "focusing on the receipt" (see my Tweet right).

Shortly thereafter I met David Crossett at FinovateSpring 2010 who shared his vision of how his startup, ReadyReceipts (note 1) is gearing up to solve this very problem. The product, still in development, uses a unique approach that doesn't rely on the end-user carrying another loyalty card (thank goodness).

If you've ever bought something in an Apple Store (in the USA at least), you can see what he has in mind. Mobile POS systems that email you the receipt and skip the easy-to-lose paper altogether.

In addition to Ready Receipts and Square, a number of other companies are working on solutions including:

• Afterbot, which is working with Intuit QuickReceipts (see below)
• allEtronic
• Intuit QuickReceipts (see first screenshot below) which is piloting with Phoenix-area Best Buys and also has an interesting Twitter linkage for spurring grass roots demand for digital receipts (second screenshot)
• MyReceipts.com from Third Solutions which is piloting with Whole Foods (third screenshot)
• Receipt-Free.com (see image at top of post)
• Transaction Tree
• 3SecondReceipts

Relevance for Netbankers: Receipt management is a very real pain-point that costs consumers millions of dollars and millions of hours of frustration every year. Financial institutions, retailers, and/or direct online financial management (OFM) providers that solve this problem stand to gain market share and/or profitable fee income (see our recent Online Banking Report on OFM features for more info).

Intuit's QuickReceipts is tackling the lost receipt problem (22 July 2010)

Intuit is spurring grass roots support by enabling visitors to send a Tweet requesting their favorite store adopt QuickReceipts (link)

MyReceipts.com from Third Solutions promotes Whole Foods participation (22 July 2010)

Note:
1. ReadyReceipts.com is currently under construction as they build out the company and product.

I'm sorry to see that Wesabe has thrown in the towel and will shutter the financial management portion of its website, leaving just the online forums intact. Customers have until July 31 to export their financial data stored at the company.

I have been a long-time fan and have been inspired by founders Jason Knight and Marc Hedlund. The company was the first VC-funded player in the online PFM space, beating Mint to market by a good nine months back in 2006. We've written about them in Netbanker and Online Banking Report, and they presented on stage at our first FinovateStartup (2008 video). 

Wesabe's been pretty quiet this year and traffic has been on the decline, but it's still a respectable 40,000 uniques per month (see below). I was hoping they would soon be announcing a new round of funding, but obviously that didn't come through. But I am somewhat surprised no other PFM player stepped in to purchase the assets, especially given Mint's $170 million exit nine months ago (note 1). I'm afraid it's a sign that the standalone OFM space is struggling.

Source: Compete, June 30, 2010

It also illustrates the point we've been making for a long time: The first hurdle for market acceptance is trust. And it's difficult for a non-bank financial management startup to earn enough trust from enough people fast enough to survive. Mint proved that it can happen, but most OFM players will need to partner with banks and credit unions to overcome the trust barrier.

Still, the Wesabe case is surprising. Well into its fourth year, with a solid track record, a core group of fans, some cool technology, and a straightforward white-labeling model, it seemed the company had made it far enough down the trust curve to be one of the survivors. But in a Wesabe groups discussion forum a few hours ago, CEO Hedlund gave a pessimistic assessment of the company's revenue outlook. In response to several posts from members saying they'd gladly pay a subscription fee to keep the company afloat, he said:

One interesting side note, Wesabe says it will open source some of the code base, so users can continue to operate the service on their own computers. That may create opportunities for scrappy entrepreneurs to build something from the ashes of Wesabe, a fitting tribute to the PFM pioneer.

Wesabe homepage (30 June 2010)

Notes:
1. Wesabe was philosophically opposed to taking outside advertising, figuring that it was not in their users' best interests, so the ad-sponsored biz model used by Mint was probably not on the table.
2. For more on the OFM/PFM market, see our latest Online Banking Report.

It's been almost four years since our last full report on online financial management (OFM). At that time (summer 2006), there was no Mint, no My Portfolio from Bank of America, and few offerings from major fintech vendors.

Yodlee was the only major player with a true OFM product, one that by year-end 2006 would be on the map in a serious way as the machinery behind BofA's new offering (2006 post).

Back then, users that wanted financial management features still relied on desktop software, primarily Intuit's Quicken and Microsoft Money.

The market has changed dramatically since then:

• Microsoft discontinued its desktop PFM altogether in 2009.
• Mint launched in 2007, quickly picked up a million users, and was acquired by Intuit for $170 million in late 2009.
• Intuit put Quicken online, then discontinued it, in favor of its new Mint.com brand.
• Intuit purchased Digital Insight and is now providing Quicken-like functions to more than 200 banks and credit unions.
• More than two dozen online personal finance companies have launched. And other than Mint, most have struggled to gain users. Many of the startups are now pursuing distribution deals through banks and credit unions.  

That's a lot of change in less than four years. But it's nothing compared to what will happen in the next four. In the report, we look at the increased role OFM features will play in future online and mobile offerings from financial institutions, specifically:  

• The key tenets of online money management, and why less is more for many banking customers
• How to mix and match features to develop the ultimate OFM package
• How the mobile channel fits in to the mix
• OFM website traffic (U.S.) for the past three years
• Current number of OFM users and a 10-year forecast
• The unique user experience of PNC Bank's Virtual Wallet (see previous post)
• Why banks and credit unions have the upper hand in the battle for OFM users, but the rise of social networks creates interesting opportunities

Future file: The rise of the Virtual Credit Union?
In all our reports, we try to shed light on what's around the corner. From where we sit today, it seems likely that most money-management activity will take place through online/mobile channels at traditional financial institutions. But we also consider an alternate future where the social networks rise up to become powerful brokers of financial services (think Facebook Credits) and become what we call "virtual credit unions."

While it's too soon to predict whether the social networked-fueled virtual credit union takes root -- regulatory issues are a huge wildcard -- there's no doubt the social networks will have a dramatic impact on payments and financial services consumption.  

------------------------------

Notes:
1. The latest report is available at no extra charge to OBR subscribers here; and can be purchased for US$495 by others here. See the Table of Contents here (PDF). 
2. In this report, we use OFM as the acronym for online financial management. But these features are also referred to as PFM (personal financial management) in many sources including previous OBR and Netbanker articles.

I have been using my new PNC Virtual Wallet account for a week now (previous coverage of the application process). The account takes a novel approach to core online banking and money management. Honestly, the user experience is so different, I’m still digesting it.

I think I love it, but I want to make sure it’s not just the novelty I’m attracted to. And that it really makes sense for users to interact with their bank accounts this way. I cover the PFM/OFM features in the most recent Online Banking Report and will publish a complete analysis in the future. But <spoiler alert>, I’ll reveal the account’s secret now.

Calendar view.

PNC did not invent the calendar approach to tracking finances. Most of the OFM/PFMs and online banking platforms we’ve had on stage in Finovate during the past three years, eg. Mint, Fiserv, Metavante, Intuit and others, have it. 

But Virtual Wallet (VW) defaults to calendar view. And they don’t let you change that. If you are a VW user, you will be managing your finances in calendar-flow mode. The designers took a risk here, but I think it pays off. They are targeting younger users, who have not grown up viewing reverse-chronological transaction lists, so why not train them from the get-go in how to manage the past, present, and future on a single page.

The first time you log in, the software asks when you get paid so it can add those happy events to your cash-flow calendar. Then as soon as you start making transactions they show up on the calendar along with your current balance in a blue bar at the top of each date (see screenshot below). Also, future events such as bill payments, are shown on the appropriate day to keep you from overdrawing your account.

It’s a good way to see what’s happening. But it also seems like a little more work. Like I said, I’m still evaluating the user experience tradeoffs here.

The Pig
As much as I enjoy exploring the big-picture ramifications of this new user experience, the real reason I finally opened a VW account is for the pig. Maybe it’s the Iowa boy in me, but I’m a sucker for pigs.

VW has a cute feature, admittedly aimed at somewhat younger customer than your typical banking industry analyst, that allows you to make a checking-to-savings transfer by punching the pig graphic at the top of the screen (note 2). And the oinking sound, followed by a the cash register, kaching, punctuates the transfer perfectly.

But it was a little annoying to have to confirm each punch with a popup window asking if I really did want to send $1 to my savings account (see note 1). How about just building an undo button to protect those who get a little carried away clicking that little oinker (see the pig in the upper right in screenshot).  

Notes: 
1. Users can change the default transfer amount so that punches are equal to more than $1. 
2. Users can customize the look and sounds their pig makes. I switched mine to an orange flame motif, which I’m not sure my farming ancestors would approve of.
3. We awarded PNC’s Virtual Wallet with an OBR Best of the Web in our recap of the most important innovations of 2008 (OBR here).
4. For more on adding appropriate online financial management (OFM) features to your online banking offering, see our latest OBR published just yesterday: Online Financial Management 3.0.

I've been a fan of PNC Bank's Virtual Wallet since it launched in 2008 (previous post here and here). The combined savings/checking functions, youth orientation, PFM features, and overall user experience are intriguing. I've sampled the demo, watched the videos and read about it for two years. But I've never owned the account to experience it from the end-user perspective.

Today, I finally opened one. While I still must wait 24-48 hours to view it online, I am pleased to report that the Andera-powered online account opening processed without a hitch. It took just 4 or 5 minutes, not counting digesting the 50+ pages of disclosures and account documentation which I saved but did not read.

I'll not go through the entire process here and instead save it for an upcoming Online Banking Report (also see note below). However, I did want to point out that the PNC has the best account-opening confirmation screen I've yet seen. Here are the key elements (see corresponding letters on screenshot below):

A. Thank-you message at the top, though it could be more distinctive. I missed it the first time I looked at the screen. After spending perhaps many hours researching account options, choosing PNC, and making a real deposit, users deserve a more enthusiastic response.

B. PNC account number (masked in the screenshot)

C. Confirmation number and a recap of the account name and deposit amount

D. Specific information on what happens next

E. A toll-free number and links to email for questions

Great work PNC and Andera.

Final screen in PNC Bank's Andera-powered online opening process (4 May 2010)

Note: For more info on online account opening, see the report we published last summer.  

If PNC Bank's Virtual Wallet, launched in July 2008 (previous post), worked with any bank account instead of just PNC's, it would have hundreds of thousands of users instead of the 60,000 or so estimated by Compete.

From the outside it's hard to know whether the strategy has paid off for PNC. It depends on the profitability of these customers, how many were new to the bank, and how much was invested in the effort. 

The Virtual Wallet contains several superb products wrapped in an inviting user interface.  No wonder it's won so many awards, including an OBR Best of the Web from us. The eight awards are shown in a scrollbar at the bottom of the homepage (see inset).

One thing the wallet does better than most is try to make savings less painful or even fun (see last week's post about making banking fun). There are three ways users can boost their savings rate (see inset from PNC's demo):

• Establish automated savings transfers at various times of the month
• Set up a savings amount to be transferred every time a bill is paid (same concept as Bank of America's Keep the Change)
• And my favorite, Punch the Pig. Every time you hit the animated pig, a certain amount of cash is transferred to the Growth (savings) account.

Note: For more information on the PFM space, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features (new report available in April). For more on deposits, see Online Banking Report: Growing Your Deposits in the Digital Age (Dec. 2008).

Two weeks ago, we wrote about the first PFM in the class of 2010, HelloWallet. Now we have the second entrant: In & Out Cash Management Systems at <InOutCash.com> (press release). I had a first-hand look at the new program at the company's booth at DEMOspring 2010 today in Palm Springs, CA. The company makes its debut tomorrow morning on the show stage (video will be released later this week).

The Yodlee-powered PFM concentrates on financial fitness with built-in coaching and a dashboard of ten financial-fitness measures, such as overall savings and credit limit utilization (see inset below).

Targeted to the younger, 18-to 35-year- old segment, the site includes social features and awards points based on taking positive financial steps and exhibiting fiscal responsibility. In the future, award points will be redeemable for various financial offers and merchandise discounts. A virtual game-like environment is also on the planning board.

The company behind the new service is Value-Centered Solutions, a 19-person, San Pablo, CA-based startup launched in 2006 by founder and CEO Michael E. Parker.

The company is planning a free ad-supported option, along with a $9.95/mo ad-free premium version.

Finally, InOutCash is being pitched as a money-making opportunity for those joining a separate $60/yr program at sister company, YouAreACEO.com (second screenshot).

My take: The product looks strong and the company has some novel ideas about social aspects, rewards, and monetization. But all the talk about the "business opportunity" takes away from the site's focus on helping less-sophisticated users get a handle on their spending and debt. I'd like to see them ditch the make-money-fast piece and focus on building a solid Gen X/Y PFM.

InOutCash.com homepage (22 March 2010)

The product is also being pitched as a money-making opportunity

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

During 2008, we tracked more than a dozen new PFM launches. But it's been quiet since then. The last major launch was Thrive (now part of Lending Tree) at Finovate 2008. However, with Mint exiting with a $100+ million gain late last year, the space is bound to heat up again. 

It's not like there isn't room for quite a few entrants. The United States supports 15,000 banks and credit unions; there's no reason why there won't be dozens of successful PFMs.

The latest entrant, HelloWallet officially launched today (press release). While its features are similar to others, it has one claim to fame that's tough to beat, an endorsement from a former U.S. president. According to a Sep. 2009 BusinessWeek article, Bill Clinton, singled out HelloWallet in his address to the $20,000-per person Global Initiative event in September.

The for-profit site founded by former Brookings Institute fellow, Matt Fellowes (Brookings archive; inset with Bill Clinton), has attracted the attention of both politicians and foundations with its mission to:

...democratize access to honest, high-quality financial guidance for everyone.

HelloWallet appears to be an advertising-free business model with moderate $5/mo (or $48 annually) fees covering its costs. It's also being distributed free-of-charge through institutional partners such as The Rockefeller Foundation.

The startup has pledged to give away one subscription to a lower-income family for every five paid ones. That's a smart strategy, especially when what is being given has essentially zero marginal cost to deliver. HelloWallet's features include:

• full account aggregation so you can track all your financial accounts from one dashboard
• financial tools for investing, saving, reducing bank fees, and so on
• banking price comparisons
• budgeting tools
• bank-fee and credit-card-APR monitoring services
• goal-based savings

My take: I kicked the tires a bit, successfully setting up automated access to my checking account, and manually adding a few more assets. But the site was a little buggy today, hitting me with error messages and delivering dead links, so I'll hold off judgement until they get things stabilized. But it looks like a well-funded and promising effort so far.

HelloWallet homepage on launch day (8 Mar. 2010)

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

One of the most important trends in the online/mobile world is the so-called real-time Web. Here's how Wikipedia defines it:

...technologies and practices which enable users to receive information as soon as it's published, rather than requiring that they check a source periodically for updates.

Online banking should have gone real-time long ago, but privacy concerns and a legacy of batch processing -- not to mention the 100-year credit crisis -- have kept info delivery in very non-real-time at most financial institutions (note 1).

As balance/transaction email alerts appeared on the scene in 1996/1997, the perfect solution to keep consumers informed on a timely basis seemed assured. But for most users, financial alerts have not lived up to their promise. Why?

1. Users must remember to establish alerts while they are banking online

2. Users must establish proper parameters so they are not overwhelmed with alerts, or receive too little info

3. Those parameters must be tweaked as necessary

4. Users must select the proper email inbox(es) for the alerts

5. Users must read the alerts in a timely fashion

6. And of course, act on them if necessary

Frankly, that's just too much work for most online bankers. Sending alerts to a mobile device may help since it is typically more immediate than email. But that depends on the user and whether they really want banking messages in their text-message stream.

But we think many users, now accustomed to viewing a stream of info all day from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, RSS, and so on, will want similar delivery of financial info. Some will want their financial info to stream into their overall news feed (e.g., via Facebook, Twitter, etc.), others will prefer a separate dedicated channel (e.g., Blippy note 2, Strings). And the old-school folk will still prefer email or text-message feeds.

Once the feed is established, users will want to interact with the data, for example:

• Tagging entries for budgeting/tax purposes
• Sharing specific transactions with friends, spouses, accountants
• Forwarding transactions to bookkeeping or managers for reimbursement
• Replying to the bank/merchant regarding incorrect transactions  
• Flagging transactions for later review

The real-time Web turns online banking on its head. Creating a daily dialogue with customers, rather than one-time sessions where users log in every few days, then hope nothing goes wrong before their next login.

There are advantages in both models, but it's not really your choice which one to offer. The world has gone real-time: You can either join in or have your customers migrate to Mint/Blippy/Wesabe to tap their financial feed.

Notes:
1. This is characterization of the U.S. situation; many other countries are much further ahead, and have been operating under real-time info-flow for years. 
2. We believe there are a number of practical applications for Blippy's technology; see our previous post.
3. For more info on financial messaging and alerts, Online Banking Report subscribers should review our 2003 report on the subject.

Last October, Vantage Credit Union launched one of the most novel banking services of 2009 (or ever for that matter), transactional banking through Twitter direct messaging (see note 1). The CU earned our OBR Best of the Web designation for its creativity.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear the service has gained much traction yet. The 103,000-member St. Louis, MO-based CU has 322 Twitter followers on its public feed and about 200 on its protected TweetMyMoney feed where the t-banking takes place (Note: Updated per comment). The majority of public feed followers are analysts, bloggers, and other credit unions.

But Vantage's Twitter move isn't about number of users. It's about keeping its brand relevant with its social networking members. And splashing Twitter across your homepage is a great way to do that (see screenshot below).

Now Vantage is back at it, partnering with Finovate-alum, Geezeo to offer state-of-the-art online personal financial management (press release). It will be fun to see what VCU EVP Eric Acree, a Filene i3 member, does with the Geezeo platform. I think it's safe to say that they will put a novel spin on PFM.   

VCU is Geezeo's fourth white-label credit union client; the other three are Stanford Federal Credit Union (previous post, note 1), Alliant Credit Union, and 1st Advantage FCU. The company is also working with 1st Mariner Bank (updated March 1 per comments).

Vantage CU continues to promote its Twitter features on its homepage
(26 Feb. 2010)

Notes:
1. Stanford FCU's website still says Geezeo-powered MyMo is "coming soon" (link to the Oct. 31, 2009, dated announcement), but the link to the new service has been pulled from the SFCU homepage. 
2. For more info, see our Online Banking Report: Leveraging Twitter (May 2009)

I don't know if it has anything to do with the publicity Mint received in recent months following its acquisition by Intuit or the promotional links from Quicken's website, but the online PFM juggernaut just blew the roof off its monthly traffic. According to Compete, in January, Mint had 1.7 million unique visitors, 600,000 more than a year earlier.

To provide a little context, not counting the Dec. to April tax-time traffic spike at Intuit, Mint's traffic is now slightly HIGHER than that of its parent company (see chart #1 below). That gives you a little understanding of why Intuit coughed up $170 million for the startup.

Another way to look at it: Mint now has as much traffic as the tenth largest U.S. retail bank, BB&T (see chart #2).

The interesting question for 2010: Now that Mint is part of the establishment, what startup will rise up to challenge it? Or will the banks, back on a path to profitability, fill the need going forward? 

Chart 1: Mint's traffic is now similar to Intuit's non-tax-time traffic

Source: Compete (link)

Chart 2: Mint now has about the same number of visitors as the tenth largest U.S. retail bank, BB&T
Note: Mint is blue line below

 
Source: Compete (link)

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

I had been intrigued about rumors that Microsoft and Citibank were partnering on a joint personal-finance venture called Bundle. I was hoping for the financial services version of an Apple launch.

OK, that's a little too high of a bar to set. I was really just hoping for the next Mint or at least something we hadn't seen before. To some extent, Bundle delivered, with Mint-like attention to design and deeper data than we've seen previously. But in other ways it's just a me-too personal finance site, FiLife 2.0. Bottom line, Bundle has been open only a week so it's way too early to predict where it's going or how it makes money. 

Bundle is a personal finance startup backed by Citibank, Microsoft, and Morningstar. Two of the key execs, including CEO Jaidev Shergill, are from Citi Growth Ventures, the group charged with commercializing products and ideas that have bubbled up within the banking giant. The startup also enlisted professional journalists, including Janet Paskin who's written for Dow Jones's SmartMoney Magazine among others.

Given that pedigree, the new site is kind of a SmartMoney Magazine meets your credit card statement with some social networking thrown in the mix.  

What distinguishes it from most personal finance content providers is that Bundle showcases proprietary data, sourced from Citibank's massive card-spending warehouse. The site gives center stage to data and shows household spending personalized to your specific location.

There's also professional personal finance advice mixed with stories and comment from the community. Even the articles use the database to illustrate points (screenshot 3). 

Naturally, it's well-integrated to Facebook. You cannot even comment unless you log in via Facebook Connect. You can follow Bundle on Twitter, of course, but surprisingly there is no blog or RSS feed.

And Bundle already has its own iPhone app called Vice Tracker (iTunes link) that makes shopping for non-essentials into a tongue-in-cheek game. The unique app was added to the store two weeks ago in the Lifestyle category. 

According to the FAQs, Bundle's business model is advertising, but there are no ads on the site yet, other than the logos of the backers (Microsoft is using its MSN Money brand). Presumably, they are looking for financial advertisers, but the Citibank connection might make that a harder sell.

Analysis
I like what Bundle is doing, creating a consumer-facing company around Citibank's cardholder data. But I can't figure out who they are targeting. Maybe they haven't decided yet.

If they want to attract data junkies like myself, the data needs to be more transparent and they need more robust tools to play with it. I enjoyed being able to compare the spending of my Seattle neighbors against that of my home town in Iowa (it's surprisingly similar). But I was left with a number of questions: 

• Where does the spending data come from? The FAQs are vague on saying that it comes from Citibank card data, government sources and "other third parties." 
• If it's primarily Citibank card data, is it really representative of the entire town or just the people that hold Citibank cards? For example, Bundle tells me (screenshot #3)  that the average dining out expense in Seattle is $115 and the most common spot is Starbucks followed by McDonalds. Something seems wrong with that.  
• And furthermore, are these estimates of all spending or just that on Citibank cards? And which Citi portfolios are included? What about business cards?
• The graphical bubbles are nice, but I like to view data in tables, especially when trying to drill down and do meaningful analysis. Is there some way to see the underlying numbers?

On the other hand, if Bundle is trying to attract readers looking for personal finance advice and discussion, the data is kind of in the way, more window dressing than anything else.

Final thoughts
The graphics are great and the spending data is interesting. But why would I come back? There's only so many times in one's life that you want to compare the shopping habits of your city vs. somewhere else.

Presumably, future versions will allow you to compare your actual spending to the Bundle averages using account-aggregation technology. This is a popular feature of Wesabe, and is one of the major tenets of what we've called "social personal finance" (note 1, 2).

I also expect they'll integrate Bundle into the Citibank cardholder site so its customers can do online comparisons while they are checking their statement online.  If Citi can document a spending lift from bundled Bundle, then the startup has proven its value. Armed with that success, it could be licensed to other big card issuers, increasing the value of the Bundle data for all users, attracting more users and more advertisers. The network effect. Perhaps that's the end game here. 

#1: Main Bundle page after selecting "Seattle" as location to show spending (29 Jan. 2010)

#2: Main page after drilling down through the "Food & Drink" bubble (link)
Note: Top five restaurants for dining out in Seattle are Starbucks, McDonalds, Subway, Red Robin and Cheesecake Factory. That sounds possible, but then the average purchase size is listed at $115. That's a lot of lattes or Big Macs.

#3: The ever-present "spending balls" hover above an article by Bundle Managing Editor Janet Paskin's short post. The balls compare the spending in Brooklyn with her hometown Seattle 
Note: Brooklyn comes out cheaper, see the solid circles (Brooklyn) in front of the cross-hatched ones (Seattle).

Notes:
1. See our previous reports on Social Personal Finance (2007) and Online Investment Communities (2008).
2. Wesabe would seem to be a great acquisition if Bundle wants to add the aggregation technology piece and jump-start its user base.  Blippy-like features would also make the site more sticky.
3. For more background on the software tools being used, see the article on Bundle in Microsoft's Financial Services publication published 22 Nov. 2009.

Blippy has been one of the more controversial financial entrants in the past few years. Observers have called it the "end of privacy as we know it," a way to take "oversharing to a dizzying new level," and a "great tool for phishers." And those are just the people who like it.

Blippy, a kind of Twitter meets Yodlee service, allows users to stream their purchase activity to the startup's website. Users can choose to publish data from credit and debit cards, bank accounts, and/or directly from purchase activity at ecommerce-partners sites (see list below). It's the ecommerce transaction stream that provides the richest data describing the actual product purchased or rented rather than just a dollar total.

For example, here's an entry from @Julia who's connected her Amazon account directly to Blippy (note 1)  As you can see the Amazon purchases are shown in detail and one of the items, a giraffe teether, has elicited a question/comment from a friend (highlighting ours):

In comparison, credit card transactions list only the merchant name and not what was purchased. However, Blippy allows users to annotate their transactions to add that detail, as you can see in the following entry. 

One of the most common ways Blippy is used is to stream media consumption via iTunes and Netflix. Here are the three Netflix movies on their way to @crobertsjr:

The Palo Alto-based startup received a $1.6 million angel round in January 2010 from Ron Conway, Jason Calacanis, Twitter's Evan Williams, Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures, and others. 

How it works
I got my first taste of Blippy after it opened to the public on Jan. 14. It's simple to get started, calling for just an email address, screenname and password. You also have the option of finding friends using your email address book or choosing from a list of 13 suggested people including Blippy founder Philip Kaplan (@PUD) and interstar Jason Calacanis (@jason).

But you don't even need to register for Blippy to see it in action. There's a live stream on the homepage that anyone can watch (see screenshot below). If Blippy follows the Twitter/Facebook model, they will soon have an API available that will let outside developers tap the data stream.

Usage stats

• Number of beta users: More than 5,000 who streamed $4.5 million worth of transactions
• Most-streamed merchant: Netflix with 54,000 entries
• Most prolific spender (that I ran across): Foo Bar (@foo), who does not identify himself other than CEO at a gaming startup, has linked his business credit card and streamed more than 350 purchases worth more than $300,000 (he's a big online advertiser at Google, MySpace, Facebook).
• Most-followed user: Leo Laporte (@leolaporte), from the Premiere Radio Network, with more than 2,600 followers

Features/benefits

Data sharing within workgroups:

• Ability to share financial transactions within a family, a workgroup, or small business. It would be a great way for financial gatekeepers, e.g., the bookkeeper, CFO, or even board members/investors to keep tabs on company spending (see @foo above).
• Ability to annotate expense streams. Users can add short descriptions to expense items so their followers can see the specifics.
• Ability to discuss/comment on expense items. For example, CFO can ask "why did our Google AdWords expense spike yesterday?" and anyone in the group can comment back with an answer or speculation. We use Yammer in our company for this type of back and forth. 

Product research/social networking:

• Ability to find other customers of the same store
• Ability to discuss product or media purchases with friends or strangers
• Ability to post positive/negative info about purchases (yours or others)
• Ability to find previous purchasers of a product you are considering (currently not supported through search)
• Ability to compare how much people paid for a certain item (not currently supported through search)

Personal financial management:

• Ability to annotate expenses for future reporting (e.g., marking taxable items)
• Store transactions free for as long as Blippy keeps the servers running
• Ability to search own transactions

Financial institution opportunities
1. Card companies and banks should create similar sharing functionality for alerts; especially for small business clients. While public posting of purchase data may never have mass appeal, there are many private uses for real-time transaction data.

2. PFM's should be building this functionality now to get out in front of Mint/Intuit who could simply acquire Blippy and incorporate real-time data flow within weeks. 

3. Once the Blippy API becomes available, banks should tap it to allow their customers to use it directly from within online banking.

Analysis
Whether Blippy lives on as a standalone service is difficult to predict. It depends on whether these capabilities are incorporated into other social networks, particularly, Facebook (note 2) and Twitter. And how fast card issuers move to make real-time transaction info easily available to their own customers.

But regardless of where the company nets out, Blippy should be credited with pioneering real-time financial transaction flow, something every financial institution and ecommerce company will support in the coming years. As a result, we are awarding Blippy an OBR Best of the Web award, our first of 2010 and just the third in the past 14 months (note 3, previous winners).   

Blippy Homepage (14 Jan. 2010 7 PM Pacific)

 Optional sign-in to Gmail, Yahoo or AOL to locate friends on Blippy 

Purchases/activity at these merchants can be automatically tracked
Note: 13 ecommerce merchants currently participate (Amazon, Apple iTunes, Audible, Blockbuster, GoDaddy, GroupOn, Netflix, SeamlessWeb, Stubhub, Threadless, Wine Library, Woot, Zappos)

The Blippy real-time transaction stream
Note: You can choose to watch all activity or just that of the people you are following

Notes:
1. If she hadn't given Blippy her Amazon login info and linked only her credit card, there would be no product detail. It would just show as $80.95 spent at Amazon.
2. Blippy is similar to Facebook's ill-fated Beacon service launched in Nov. 2007. The service was quickly toned down, then eventually dismantled, due to the privacy brouhaha that ensued. Blippy is very different because its users are signing up specifically to share purchase info. 
3. OBR Best of the Web awards, from Online Banking Report, are given periodically to companies that pioneer new online and mobile banking features. It is not an endorsement of the company or product, just recognition for what we believe is an important development. Blippy is the 76th recipient since we began awarding it in 1997. There were just two winners in 2009.

It looks like we are just days away from the launch of the first Geezeo-powered private-branded online PFM. Fifty-thousand-member Stanford Federal Credit Union, one of the first financial institutions in the world to offer Internet banking in the mid-90s, has been promoting the soon-to-be-launched personal financial manager for several months.

The service, called MyMo is currently in final testing with SFCU employees. It will run both online (screenshot 1 and 2, below) and through a mobile app (inset).

MyMo has been the lead story in the CU's in-house newsletter for two months running (see screenshots 3 and 4). In November, the service was said to coming "this month." Then in December, it hedged with a "coming soon" message. There's still no specific info on when MyMo will launch, but there's a promotion running on the middle of the SFCU's homepage and Facebook page (see screenshots below), so it must be soon (note 1).  

The future: While private-branded online PFM is not new, Bank of America has several million users of its Yodlee-powered solution, the concept appears to be gaining momentum. Intuit/Digital Insight are now powering hundred of FIs while Wesabe and Jwaala have also made in-roads into the CU world. We'll see lots of innovation in this area in the coming decade (see note 2).

1. MyMo desktop: Dashboard view (link)

2. MyMo desktop: Add a goal

3. SFCU's November 2009 newsletter (link)

4. SFCU's December 2009 newsletter (link)

5. SFCU homepage (17 Dec. 2009)

6. SFCU Facebook page (link)

Notes:
1. While I think it makes sense to run a teaser campaign for a new product, SFCU should provide more detail on when the service will launch and why it's been delayed. Members want the service to be fully tested, so they won't mind waiting a bit longer as long as the CU is upfront with them about the timing.
2. For more information on the PFM space, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features.

I love startups. Just when you think you've seen everything, along comes someone doing something that no one would have ever thought of five years ago, or in this case one year ago.

The latest inspiration: Blippy. The service allows you to automatically broadcast your credit or debit card purchases using the Twitter/Facebook model (see screenshot below; note 1).

The first question everyone asks is why? (see comments at TechCrunch) But really, it's not much different than broadcasting personal details via Twitter or your whereabouts via Foursquare, especially if you limit viewing to friends. The founder, serial entrepreneur, Philip Kaplan explains in the TechCrunch interview, that he has one credit card for "social purchases" broadcast on Blippy and another for purchases he prefers to keep private.

Blippy will contain privacy controls that allow users to share everything or keep it within a closed loop of friends. The company also envisions many other privacy controls to turn the service off and on, allow users to approve transactions before publishing, suppress certain merchants, or merchant categories, and so on.

The use cases shown so far are centered around media purchases, for example using it to automatically tweet (blip?) what song or movie you bought on iTunes or social "check ins" where the service lets people know you just bought coffee at Starbucks. But I can see where it would be helpful for spouses to "broadcast" purchases only to each other. Or for a salesperson to broadcast their purchases to their assistant to build expense reports on the fly. 

The service is in closed alpha (only in use by a handful of friends and family, note 2) as the three-person company gears up for a launch. You can follow Kaplan on Twitter (@pud) for more info.

My take: I like the idea of easily sharing purchases with joint-account holders or a bookkeeper. But many (most?) online banking systems and PFMs already allow this through the alerts system. You may want to boost education efforts on this capability.

As for Tweeting about songs downloaded via iTunes, wouldn't most users prefer to maintain more control over that by simply using Twitter or Facebook to directly type a short note? But we know from experience, if there's a way to do something with less effort, it stands a good chance of succeeding.  

I'm not expecting widespread adoption any time soon, but I think there is a market for sharing spending transactions.

Here's something for innovative FIs to consider: Add a "share this" button next to credit/debit card transaction and let users send the info via email, Twitter or Facebook with a couple keystrokes (see inset from FiLife).

I know it sounds far-fetched, but it might be just the thing to make your card stand out with heavy users of social media.

Blippy homepage showing spending stream (16 Dec. 2009)

Note:
1. For more info in Twitter, see our Online Banking Report on the technology published in May.
2. Twitter's Evan Williams is using Blippy as shown in screenshot taken by CNET's Rafe Needleman in his article earlier this week.

If anyone still wondered how serious Intuit is about incorporating the Mint brand into its portfolio after its $170 million acquisition, take a look at the latest version of the Quicken sales site. Mint is prominently featured (see first screenshot below), especially if you scroll one "ad spot" over (second screenshot).

I also found Mint mentioned at PayTrust, Intuit's bill management site (third screenshot). There's even a small plug on the Quicken Online login page (fourth screenshot).

However, on Mint's site the co-branding is not reciprocated. Quicken is not mentioned at all and Intuit is relegated to 8-point type at the bottom of the page (fourth screenshot).

The latest traffic figures from Compete support the theory that Intuit is de-emphasizing Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Traffic to <quicken.intuit.com> fell 50% in November to about 400,000, while Mint held steady at about 3x that, 1.2 million unique visitors.

Source: Compete, 10 Dec 2009 (link)

Quicken homepage on default choice, Quicken 2010 (link; 9 Dec. 2009, 11 PM)

Quicken homepage with Mint.com selected from scrolling choices
Note: Yellow highlight is mine

Intuit PayTrust homepage (link)

Quicken Online login page (link)

Mint homepage
Intuit mentioned twice at bottom of page (yellow highlight is mine). 

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

A few days ago, we predicted there would be tens of thousands of financial institution iPhone apps as the big banks released dozens to support their major business lines. PNC Bank and Wells Fargo were the two examples we cited.

There's another multi-app bank: Chase. In our search for an iPhone gift planner to replace the web-based Zions Bank service, we ran discovered the bank's Gift Planner (iTunes link).

Version 1.0 was released in time for the holidays last year (3 Dec. 2008), but it looks like Chase didn't take over ownership/sponsorship until release 2.0 in August. The app is supported by an excellent small website at yourgiftplanner.com that displays the app and solicits feedback.

The app and website are 100% Chase branded. The only indication that a third party is involved is a notation in the iTunes store that the app is sold by The Archer Group (inset), a Wilmington, DE-based digital agency.

Evidently, the app didn't show up on our radar because it's placed in the App Store Productivity category instead of Financial. The app doesn't appear to be mentioned on the Chase main website. A site search there came up blank.

Review: It's great looking app that can be used for any holiday. The app supports "shake for help," an advanced feature. The integration with your contact list makes it easy to add new contacts without typing, although you must wade through your entire list. And, the process of adding gifts is a bit tedious. You have to add a gift to the master gift list, then go to each person and add the gift to their profile. It would be better if you could simply type a gift on the fly.

iPhone users have been relatively unimpressed, giving the latest version a 2-star rating out of five; pretty low for a professional app (see inset).

It's a good branding tool for Chase, but it the app itself could use retooling.

Gift Planner iPhone screenshots (24 Nov 2009)

Gift Planner website (link)

Note: For more info on mobile banking on the iPhone see our March Online Banking Report.

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.

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.

I finally finished our latest report on small business online banking last night. Just as I was about to upload it, I realized there was something missing in the "dream online banking solution" for small businesses.

So I stopped the "presses" and added it to the report. What was the missing piece? A financial and business management dashboard integrated with online banking.

I poked around the web today and found a few interesting products (see update below), none of which were quite what I was looking for, and had no direct connection to financial institutions:

• MyBizHomepage has a dashboard that integrates with QuickBooks and sounds pretty slick. But there website hasn't been updated for more than a year, so not sure if this is a viable business or just a hobby site. I have an inquiry in to the owner.
• DreamFactory Software also offers QuickBooks-integrated dashboards. I found it in the new Intuit App Center for QuickBooks add-ins (here). It's a powerful program, but not the kind of plug-and-play dashboard I'm looking for.
• iDashboards: Has impressive sample dashboards to view. None integrate directly with online banking, but many include financial data (see screenshot below).

So I'm still looking for financial institution examples. Know any? Comment below or email me. It's too late to make our report, but we'll report it here.

iDashboards mockup of a healthcare "billing scorecard" (link, 28 Oct 2009)

Update (29 Oct 2009):

Here's another QuickBooks dashboard from QuickGauge.com:

I was poking around the various small business online accounting sites today researching our next Online Banking Report and thinking about which service would suit our business, given that Microsoft is pulling the plug on Money.

I was already familiar with Outright.com (a Finovate 2009 presenter; demo video coming soon), FreshBooks, and LessAccounting. But I was completely surprised by one contender in the free category: Intuit QuickBooks Online.

The software giant offers three flavors of online-only accounting (see screenshot below; full comparison here):

• QuickBooks Online Free: Create and send invoices, print checks, track money flow for up to 20 customers and run basic reports; even includes email support
• QuickBooks Online Basic: In addition to the above, for $9.95/mo, users can manage an unlimited number of customers, set permissions for others to access data, and choose from a library of 40 standard reports
• QuickBooks Online Plus: Full-fledged QuickBooks for $34.95/mo, mimics most features of QuickBooks Pro (see comparison here)

Financial institution opportunities:
All four online accounting companies offer free versions and premium fee-based options (note 1). Consider linking to them from your small business resource center. For extra credit, develop a co-branded version you can offer your customers or negotiate discounts for the fee-based versions.

Intuit's QuickBooks Online product line (14 Oct 2009)

Notes:
1. Outright.com is currently free for all users, but says it is working on value-added, fee-based options.
2. For more info on the small biz space, see our Online Banking Report: Small & Microbusiness Banking (June 2004). Note: Anyone who purchases the 2004 version now, will automatically receive the newer version when it's published later this month.

The rumors broke yesterday and the confirmation came today. Intuit is buying two-time Finovate Best of Show winner, Mint for $170 million (see note 1). Few people are surprised by this move or the price. Mint's latest VC investors had just invested at a $140 million valuation a few weeks ago, so $170 mil is in line with that. It's also a 5x return to the total VC investment of $32 million, so everyone associated with Mint has to be pretty happy, especially in an environment where most assets have fallen by double digits in the past two years.

The bigger question is whether the startup is worth $170 million? To Intuit, I think the answer is definitely yes (see below).

Intuit shareholders were indifferent with no real movement in share price today (see inset) on lower-than-normal trading volume (note 2). Because of the deal, Intuit lowered per-share net income estimates by 2 cents ($6.5 million loss) for FY 2010, and says there will be no material impact after that.

Apparently, Intuit will keep the Mint brand, at least for now. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer will be general manager of Intuit's personal finance products, both online AND desktop.

I'm no M&A expert, but here's why $170 million sounds reasonable to me:

• At Intuit's current multiple (20x), Mint needs to generate approximately $10 million in annual profits to break even for shareholders. With 1+ million users at Mint, that's $10 per user per year, less than a buck a month.
• While Mint isn't likely making that type of profit today, the combination of lower costs from Intuit back-end systems and additional revenues from upselling Intuit services (TurboTax, Cuckoos, and others), should elevate Mint to a $10 million-plus business unit relatively quickly.
• Intuit needs an entree to the young-and-frugal segment, and Mint can be the starting point with users migrating to Quicken Online (which can be returned to a fee-based, advertising-free service), TurboTax, and/or QuickBooks over time.
• Plus there's a bunch of intangibles that are difficult to quantify until you see how Intuit handles the Mint.com user base. Even though there's the usual grousing from Mint users today, in reality, Intuit's trustworthy brand name should be able to retain current users and grow the base.

Here's how I break down the purchase price:

$5 to $10 mil >>> Assets: Code, IP, employees, etc.
$10 to $20 mil >> Brand: Name, URL, traffic, awards, etc.
$100+ mil >>>>> Customers (1,000,000 at $100 each)
$25 to $50 mil >> Option value

Notes:
1. Mint won the audience voting for Best of Show at both our 2007 and 2008 Finovate conferences. If you want to see and meet the next Mint, we have a few dozen tickets left for Finovate 2009 on 29 Sep (purchase tickets here).
2. Last week, shares fell $0.40 or 1.4%.

Last September, six online personal finance managers launched in a single month (previous post). Since then, just a handful of new PFMS have appeared online. Most newcomers have instead chosen the iPhone where more than 1,000 finance apps have launched in the past 12 months.

The iPhone is great for on-the-go transaction processing, but most PFM users will still do their heavy lifting at their computer, setting budgets, tracking expenses, planning for the future, preparing tax returns and so on. So the online venue is still the key competitive battleground. 

Two new online efforts have come to my attention in recent weeks. We'll look at them in more detail later this year (see note 1). 

• Cashflow INSITE, from Neuralus. The Winnipeg, Canada-based startup is looking to partner with banks and credit unions to deliver the PFM. The company is also targeting the financial advisor market where they have a number of independent advisors paying a flat fee (currently under $100/mo) to support up to 100 clients on the Cashflow INSITE platform. 
• PocketSmith, a New Zealand-based firm which launched its beta last year, uses the popular calendar approach to tracking personal cash flow and appears to be gaining some traction in the United States. It's monthly unique U.S. visitor total in July was more than 8,000 according to Compete (see chart below). That puts it at number 13 of the busiest online PFMs in the U.S. according to estimates from Compete (note 2). It's also the highest ranked newcomer to the chart and the non-US PFM with the most U.S. traffic.

PocketSmith monthly traffic estimates from Compete
Monthly unique visitors Aug. 2008 through July 2009

Cashflow INSITE homepage (21 Aug 2009)

PocketSmith homepage (21 Aug 2009)

Notes:
1. We covered the personal financial management space several times in Online Banking Report, most recently: Personal Finance Features for Online Banking; Social Personal Finance; and Online Investing Communities.
2. See the current issue of Online Banking Report: 2010 Planning Guide, for the U.S. traffic estimates for 28 online PFMs.

Microsoft will stop selling its Microsoft Money packaged personal finance management (PFM) software at the end of this month (FAQ here). Online services will expire Jan. 31, 2011, or earlier depending on when users activated their program.

The company will continue its online-only account management and bill pay services at MSN Money. Banks supporting direct downloads to the program, such as US Bank and Wells Fargo, will have to migrate users to other options, most likely Intuit's Quicken.

For me, it's an end of an era. The main reason I became involved in the online banking industry was to participate in a four-bank group that worked with Microsoft to add online banking and bill pay to Microsoft Money 3.0 (note 1), released in Feb. 1994 (see inset). It was an industry milestone and a major coup for the company at the time, bringing online banking to its PFM more than two years ahead of Quicken. 

So, after 15 years of using the program, I'll finally have to make the long overdue move to QuickBooks to manage our company finances. But to be safe, I'm going with QuickBooks online, which I'm guessing will not become obsolete in my lifetime.

Microsoft Money Plus page announces the end of the line (link, 9 June 2009)

Notes:
1. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft Money is currently on version 17.

Usually, it's the big ideas that get all the press. Last week alone, Microsoft launched a new search engine (Bing), Google announced a new way to communicate (Google Wave), and Facebook began rolling out an alt-payment service to its 200 million users. 

Those have intriguing long-term ramifications, but can they save you money today? 

Here's something a little more pragmatic: A tool that promises to make it easy to challenge your tax assessment, potentially saving hundreds or thousands of dollars annually. Enter LowerMyAssessment.com (LMA).

I saw a few screenshots of the service during the company's application to debut at FinovateStartup 2009 last month (demo video here). But I couldn't use the service until a few weeks ago.

How it works
Consumers visiting LMA can use the website's free tool to check their home's value against current market estimates. LMA taps public databases to determine tax-assessed values and calculates market value from various third-party sources such as Zillow.

The company then makes the simple math calculation and informs users if the value of their home is under the tax-assessed value. If it is, LMA provides forms and instructions to challenge tax assessments with the local assessor's office.

In our test case, using an address in Seattle, one of 10 states currently served by LMA, we were told that its assessed value was $300,000 more than the market value (note 2). LMA encouraged me to register and let them help me challenge that assessment.

Registered users complete an online form with info needed to challenge their assessment (see screenshot 3 below). After completing that form, users must pay $125 to complete the challenge process and receive their FairValue Report (shown above).  

Analysis
While the cost-saving potential is significant, the challenge for LMA is getting consumers to shell out $125 for something they can conceivably do themselves (note 3). It took us just a few minutes using Google to uncover the challenge forms and procedures at the King County website. And market value estimates can be pulled from Zillow and its competitors.   

To reduce sticker shock, the company recently removed the big $125 price tag from its homepage (see screenshot 1) and is now emphasizing the free lookup feature (screenshot 2). I can understand downplaying a three-figure fee, especially online. But now they've gone too far the other way. I cannot find the price of the service anywhere on the website. It wasn't disclosed until I completed my registration and filled out the challenge form (see screenshot 4 below).

There's also the small matter of getting the word out. The major market opportunity will largely be gone once home prices get back to their pre-recession levels, even though there will always be cases where consumers feel their assessment is unfair. But LMA needs to team with major financial or real estate firms as soon as possible to reach large groups of potential customers. 

Bank and credit union opportunities
As discussed in previous posts, direct fee income is scarce in online banking, at least in the United States. Aside from credit bureau monitoring, there are few up-front fees that consumers are willing to pay. Certainly, banks earn billions from the underlying checking, debit, and credit card accounts, but nothing from the value added online.

It's possible the service could be replicated by a bank or mortgage provider using available APIs from Zillow or others. But for most banks, it would be far simpler to outsource the service to LMA or other specialists.

If the service were sold for $100+, with revenue shared 50/50, a bank or credit union could earn a respectable profit while providing a unique and free service to customers; however, the folks at City Hall may not be so appreciative. If city government is a big customer, you might tread carefully here.

1. New LowerMyAssessment homepage emphasizes free (2 June 2009)

2. Previous homepage disclosed the substantial fee up-front (12 May 2009)

3. Online appeal form for King County Washington (2 June 2009)

4. $125 (+tax) fee is not disclosed until checkout (2 June 2009)

Notes:
1. States currently covered: Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Washington
2. That was on May 11. Now, three weeks later, LMA shows the house having declined another 20%. Home prices are certainly fluctuating, but not that much. It appears that LMA has switched to using Zillow's low estimate instead of the mid-range one. That may help sell more services, but it's a bit misleading. It would be much better to show the range of potential market values pulling data from all three third-party valuation sites, in much the way RedFin does. 
3. They also have some work to do in clarifying the buying process. It's not really clear exactly what you are buying at checkout. Are you submitting a property-tax challenge at that point? What about the FairValue Report? When do you see that? But we'll cut them slack on that since they just launched a few weeks ago.

Yesterday, Rudder suffered an embarrassing email glitch that affected 732 customers. In the pre-Internet days, no one other than those few hundred customers, and a few of their friends, would have heard about it. Even in the days before blogs became common, pre-2007, it's unlikely the story would have made it to the mainstream press.

And even last year, before Twitter, the story might have died without ever crossing over to the mass media. But when it comes to breaking news and company gaffes, it's a whole new ball game. Everyone wants 15 minutes of fame as an investigative reporter, and Twitter is the dream platform.

I'm going to recap the problem, and how the news broke, in excruciating detail, because it illustrates the power of Twitter- and blog-fueled grassroots reporting. If you are a financial services company, think about how you could use social media to help with damage control should something similar happen to you.  

What happened at Rudder
According to the detailed description first published in TechCrunch and then later published by the company on a new blog created specifically for this issue, an email upgrade the night of May 18 caused 732 users to receive dozens of email updates containing balance and transaction information of other users. Only Rudder users with email addresses that begin with "a" or "b" received the erroneous emails because the company stopped the email job at that point after realizing the "upgrade" had gone terribly wrong.

Besides seeing the info in the email updates, the bigger security/privacy problem was that unauthorized users were able to click through email links to access the full aggregated account at Rudder.com (see screenshot in the TechCrunch article). However, at no time could anyone actually log in to anyone's bank account or move money in any way.

Luckily, Rudder, like all account-aggregation companies, does not include account numbers or personal details in the updates. However, the email addresses of each user was displayed, so any of the 732 customers using an email address at Rudder that can be traced back to their real name, had their financial details exposed to hundreds of users. 

How the news broke
At 5:36 AM yesterday (19 May), Twitter user @adambassador tweeted this:

And @adambassador didn't stop at that. He took the time to search and communicate warnings directly to several other users who'd recently mentioned "Rudder.com" on Twitter. Adambassador would go on to tweet 21 times yesterday about the Rudder problem.

One of the people who heard from @adambassador was financial services consultant and blogger, Mike Linskey (@mikelinskey) who'd just Tweeted about several of the PFM companies he'd seen at our FinovateStartup conference, including Rudder.com. Mike then posted the problem to his Fincision blog at 8:04 AM, and at Mike's request, adambassador posted screenshots of the emails to document the problem, which were then published in Mike's blog entry.

At 10:05 AM, using Twitter, Mike alerted the blog Mashable about the Rudder problem. A half-hour later, Mashable, the fifth largest blog in the country (see note 1), posted the story citing adambassador's tweets and Mike's blog entry. From the Mashable blog entry (below), the problem was retweeted 115 times (see the retweet button below on left).

Then at noon, the second largest blog, TechCrunch, with more than 2 million subscribers, posted the story. And because of high comment activity, it stayed on the top of TechCrunch most of the day (see screenshot below), generating 58 comments.

How Rudder handled it
By almost any standard, Rudder did a good job responding. Although their reply took more than 10 hours since the error was first reported on Twitter, Rudder's CEO posted a detailed comment on the TechCrunch (scroll down to his comment at 4:38 PM here) and Mashable posts, apologizing for the error and explaining in great detail what had happened. 

In addition, Rudder created a special "Rudder Update" blog (see screenshot below) apologizing, explaining the mishap and exactly what info was mistakenly displayed, and detailing the steps they were taking to fix the problem and help affected customers:

• Turned off the email system entirely
• Contacted each affected user individually and offered them a complimentary subscription to an identity theft service
• Engaged an independent security auditor to survey its system and look for weaknesses
• Published a URL for users to go in and delete their accounts if desired

Analysis
Rudder did a good job considering the situation. It was smart to comment on TechCrunch and Mashable, and the new damage-control blog site was a savvy move. And the company did an exceptionally good job with the tone and wording of its mea culpa.

That said, the company could have used social media better. The company's Twitter page (@userudder) and that of its CEO (@nikhilroy) were silent all day. A short Twitter posting, even "we've stopped all emails and are working on it" would have reassured users and potentially made the Mashable post less alarming. Also, the company didn't have a blog, so there was no place where they could post periodic updates during the day. It was complete silence for 11 hours, other than the interview with TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld mid-day.

Impact on third-party PFM credibility
While this was embarrassing and violated the privacy of several hundred users, there will likely be no financial loss to anyone. There was no data breach or stolen account numbers. Even a single bank account statement stolen from a mailbox could cause more potential financial damage.

And even though third-party PFM providers have had a relatively spotless record for security/privacy, this mistake, now well-documented in two of the largest online publications in the world, will be cited in the media for years, to cast doubt on the security of online personal finance.

It might cost the industry a point or two in short-term market share, but it would take something much worse to materially slow growth. Even Rudder should be fine. By addressing the issue in a highly professional way on the same day, most customers will be reassured, at least those that weren't directly impacted.

The bigger lesson here is the need for damage-control procedures that take into account the power and speed of new media (note 3). The entire episode could have--prior to Twitter and the blogosphere--been known to just a few hundred customers of a very small company, but instead traveled from a lone tweet to a large splash across the homepage of a major publication, all within a 6-hour period.     

TechCrunch featured the Rudder post on its main page most of the afternoon (19 May 2009)

Special damage control blog created by Rudder yesterday
(19 May 2009; link)

Note:
1. Ranking by Technorati authority (here)
2. Thanks to Mike Linskey for the tip yesterday morning.
3. Also, account aggregation users should use an email address that is not directly associated with their name.

Yesterday, Intuit launched its first native app for the iPhone, Quicken Online Mobile. It's already risen to number four in the Finance category (note 1), and will likely hit number one given the number of Intuit fans using the iPhone. Currently, E*Trade's new Mobile Pro claims the top spot.

Intuit has incorporated some interesting features including this user-friendly "what's left until payday" feature. Users can access a graphical map of their future balance level (below) and get a warning (right) if the account looks like it will run out before the next payday.

Intuit also uses the GPS/location-based capabilities of the iPhone with a built-in ATM finder (click on inset for larger view). And finally, users are able to input transactions on the fly to get a real-time look at the impact to their budgets on the latest expenses.

The two-minute YouTube video (link) is worth watching to see how to position your iPhone PFM as a mobile financial assistant (speaker is Intuit product manager, Barron Ernst):

There are a number of personal finance apps available on the iPhone platform including Mint, Wesabe (announced Tuesday at FinovateStartup), MoneyTrackin, iBearSoft Software, and dozens more. 

Notes:
1. Quicken's mobile app is number four in the free apps section of the iTunes Finance apps section as of 8:30 AM Pacific time, 2 May 2009. It has 73 user reviews with an average 4-star rating (excellent). In comparison, Mint which launched its iPhone app in December has nearly 13,000 reviews.
2. According to VentureBeat, Quicken Online passed the 1-million user mark in mid-April.

Apple must be one of the more lucrative advertisers these days at the Wall Street Journal. Apple has bought the back page more times than I can count to show off the iPhone and more-importantly, the diversity of applications available (see inset, note 1).

Lately, Apple has run "theme" ads showing applications related to a single category. Last week (Thurs, 9 April), the back of the A section showed personal finance apps (see left column below). Yesterday, the apps all supported small business and ran on the back of Marketplace (B) section (see right column below).

The only app to make both lists: personal finance superstar, Mint, which even scored top billing in the personal finance page, occupying the upper-left corner, where it's blurb would likely score the highest readership. 

The Apple website also has themed app guides. The managing money page (see screenshot below) features again features Mint, which gets the biggest graphic, Bank of America, who's app was featured in dozens of Apple ads in 2008 and earlier this year, Bloomberg, Gas Cubby, iXpenseIt, Save Benjis, and Home Finder.

Bottom line: Financial institutions should think about how to add similar money management functionality to their mobile and online offers. As Aite's Ron Shevlin pointed out in a comment here last week (emphasis added):

.....(the FinovateStartup participants) you talk about are helping people manage their financial lives, while the banks are [still] focused on helping people manage their financial accounts.

Big difference.

Table: iPhone apps listed in recent WSJ ads (clockwise from upper left)

Apple's Money Management page on its Website (link, 16 Apr 2009)

Notes:
1. My apologies for the image quality, taken via iPhone naturally.
2. For more info, see our latest Online Banking Report: Mobile Banking via iPhone.

Launched in Oct. 2007, Xpenser (see note 1) is a financial tool designed for tracking items for business expense reports. Monthly traffic is about 6,000 unique visitors according to Compete.

To understand Xpenser, visualize how Mint works, then think of the opposite.

• Mint is full automated; Xpenser is all one-off data entry.
• Mint has graphics that will blow you away; Xpenser has lists.
• Mint requires you to divulge your banking usernames and passwords; Xpenser just needs your email address.
• With Mint, you can track your bank accounts, investment accounts and net worth; Xpenser only helps you submit your next expense report.

Xpenser's mission from its website:

We were fed up with how painful expense reports and tracking were. After many experiments we found a workable solution: record expenses as soon as they happen and forget about them.

How it works
After a registration process that requires no more than your email address, you can begin immediately submitting expenses to the service via:

• Email by sending a message to e@xpenser.com with the free-form expense listed in the subject line
• iPhone optimized site (see inset); it's not in the App Store, but you can add an Xpenser button to your iPhone by navigating to the Xpenser website and pressing the + button
• SMS by sending a text message to 66937 (MOZES), using "exp" followed by the free-form expense description
• Voice via Jott or Dial2Do (both free services)
• Twitter via direct message from your registered Twitter account
• IM via Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Google Talk
• Browser search box in Firefox or IE 7+ (see below)
• Secure website via standard input form

Once the expenses are collected, users go online and move each expense to the appropriate report. Transaction amounts and descriptions can be edited.

The company is building open APIs, so developers, including banks, can use the service to kick-start their own personal finance tools. The company says it will build premium fee-based versions with long-term archives along with other features.

Xpenser competes directly with Expensify (see note 2), a company that will be demo'ing at our upcoming FinovateStartup conference.

Data entry via the browser search box
Although, it's not a core piece of the program, I was perplexed when I saw that one of the methods of entering expense data into your Xpenser account was through the "search box." That was probably what convinced me to sign up for the account.

Here's how it works in Firefox (also works in IE 7+ and any browser that supports OpenSearch):

• Navigate to the Xpenser website
• Click on the drop-down area next to the browser search box
• Add Xpenser as a "search engine"
• Then simply type the expense amount and description in the search box making sure that Xpenser is the selected as search engine (see second screenshot below), and press enter; Xpenser recognizes your account through cookies and adds the "search term" to your data file

That feature is so clever, it's almost creepy. I'm not sure a bank would want to use this feature since it could capture any search term the user inadvertently input while the bank's "search engine" was selected in the browser search box. 

Xpenser main account page (30 March 2009)

Input via the browser search box (30 March 2009)

Notes:
1. Not to be confused with FinovateStartup alum, Expensr, now part of Strands.

2. Expensify has abandoned the decoupled debit business model it was using when we wrote about it's launch last fall (previous post).  It now offers the choice of a prepaid MasterCard or an American Express-issued card.

3. For more information, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features for Online Banking and our Online Banking Report on Social Personal Finance. 

Today, Wesabe (company blog post) joined Geezeo (press release) in officially pursuing a strategy of white-labeling its personal finance services for banks and credit unions (note 1). Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund told me they have three deals in various stages of the contract process, but none have signed on the dotted line yet.

You can get an idea of how this will play out by visiting Wesabe's first co-branded site at the UK's Daily Telegraph (see screenshot below). However, in the banking rollout, the service can truly be white labeled with no mention of the Wesabe name. Wesabe provided a mockup of its white-label product for the fictitious Springboard Bank (see second screenshot below).

As much as I love online PFM sites, the future for most financial management activity is within the confines of online banking sites (note 2). Why? Most people do NOT enjoy tagging purchases, tracking their budget, monitoring their net worth in real-time, or debating the latte factor.

Banking, like most chores, needs to be accomplished as efficiently as possible. And the easiest way to track financial activity is at the place the customer already knows, trusts, and uses, their online banking site (note 3). 

That doesn't mean there isn't a place for Mint, Quicken and other PFM sites. Millions of consumers and small businesses pay close attention to every transaction. And they'll invest time, and money, into standalone sites that offer state-of-the art tools and independent perspectives.    

But by partnering with full-featured PFMs like Wesabe, banks and credit unions give customers little reason to look elsewhere. Wesabe is particularly well-suited for the role of financial institution service provider (note 4):

• Technology: It owns the aggregation engine, so they have more flexibility in pricing and contract negotiations
• API: Wesabe has featured a public API since 2007, so it's easier for bank developers to hook into its rich dataset
• Features: Has state-of-the-art user interface including a Twitter interface, widgets for Mac and Windows Vista, an iPhone-optimized site, and soon an iPhone app
• Brand: It has taken the high road....positioning the Wesabe brand as an unbiased financial guide; in fact, they've never taken advertising or commissions from financial providers
• Experience: Launching in 2006, they have been around longer than most other players, giving them credibility and a better longitudinal database
• Traffic: Of independent PFM sites (see Jan. traffic here), Wesabe trails only Mint and Geezeo in monthly traffic (120,000 unique visitors in Feb according to Compete), so it brings an established community and financial database to their financial institution clients

Make vs. buy
For a financial institution, the advantage of working with Wesabe vs. building PFM capabilities in-house include:

• Speed to market: Outsourcing allows FIs to get the PFM features in to the market much faster; depending on level of integration, could launch in a few months
• Integration: Although young, Wesabe is an experienced aggregator and technology company; this expertise can be tapped to provide integrate bill payment and funds transfer capabilities
• Existing community: FIs can leverage the vibrant Wesabe community to instantly provide interesting content and community
• Cost savings: Gives the financial institution state-of-the-art features much faster, and usually at a lower cost, than building them in-house

Wesabe's co-branded site at UK's Daily Telegraph (link) (18 March 2009)

Wesabe mock-up of white-labeled PFM interface (18 March 2009)

Notes:
1. Wesabe's new service is called Springboard and Geezeo's is Spectrum.
2. Assuming banks and credit unions offer a reasonable set of personal finance management tools.
3. For more info, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features for Online Banking and Online Banking Report on Social Personal Finance.
4. Geezeo also boasts similar benefits; while it's a year younger and doesn't own the aggregation engine, its provider, CashEdge is already used and trusted by many large financial institutions, and Geezeo boasts higher traffic than Wesabe. 
5. Come talk to Wesabe's execs at our FinovateStartup 2009 conference, April 28 in San Francisco.

I love personal financial management websites. Not so much for the reality, actually I hate tracking expenses, but for the promise. The illusion of having everything under control, never overdrafting, never missing a payment, and with perfectly-shaded multi-color pie charts just a click away (inset from Mint). 

But I've always thought that once banks and credit unions added basic PFM functions to their online banking services (see note 1), it's game-over for most independent PFM sites. They would have to either license their platform to financial institutions, sell out, or close their doors.

Now I'm not so sure.

Mint did something recently that made me reconsider. It was really pretty simple when you think about it. Yet as far as I know, no bank, card issuer, or even credit union has ever taken this on. 

The Mountain View, CA-based startup scanned their members' credit card statements to identify bogus charges from a known scam. And the company plans to make the resulting fraud alert service a standard part of its offering.  

From American Banker (23 Jan 2009):

Mint Software Inc. is planning to roll out a tool that will automatically scan its 800,000 users' accounts for potentially bogus charges....Aaron Patzer, Mint's founder and chief executive, said the idea for the new product came after his company heard of a scam involving Adele Services of Melville, N.Y., a bogus merchant that was making 25-cent charges to millions of consumer accounts. The news was widely reported, and Mint decided to check its users' accounts its to see if any had been affected; it found 800 that were.

Score 1 for the upstarts.

Bottom line: If the online PFM purveyors harness technology to take better care of banking customers than the banks themselves, especially with practical, money-saving ways such as Wesabe's Cutback Tool (below), the newcomers have a bright future indeed.

Note: For more info, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features for Online Banking.

We've regularly cited third-party estimates of website traffic to Mint and other PFMs. More often that not, we'll get a comment or email taking us to task for using such inexact and/or irrelevant data. But we believe that website traffic, even a rough approximation, is a leading indicator of success. 

Luckily, we now have better metrics for the two online leaders. In response to what appears to be a truth-in-advertising query from Intuit's general counsel (see note 1), Mint disclosed its registered-user count (note 2), which has been growing at an average of 17% per month in Q4 2008 and so far in this year. 

As of yesterday, Mint had 934,000 users, double third quarter's end-count. That's 3,400 new registered users per day (seven days a week), almost 25,000 per week. The company should pass one million before St. Patrick's day.

While this growth in registered users is impressive, what's truly astonishing is that 70% of the registered users, 680,000 so far, have entered at least one bank or credit card username/password in order to automatically download transactions into Mint.

In response to Mint's disclosure, Quicken Online reported its 650,000 registered users, currently growing at a 45,000-per-week clip. If that continues, they'll pass one million before the April tax deadline.

It looks like there's quite a battle shaping up between the two leading online personal finance specialists. And don't overlook the banks. Both Bank of America (2.5 mil as of April 2008) and Wells Fargo (1 mil as of Nov 2008) have more online personal finance users at this point.

What it means: Account aggregation, left for dead a few years ago, is making a fearsome comeback. The three biggest players, Bank of America, Mint, and Quicken Online, now have more than 4 million registered users, approximately 4% of all U.S. banking households (note 3).

Table: Mint Registered Users by Month

Source: Mint, Feb. 2009
*Registered users are anyone who has signed up with email address
** Through Jan 25 (per Mint letter, 28 Jan)
***Through Feb 19 (per TechCrunch post, 19 Feb)

Notes:
1. Intuit's letter to Mint here.
2. Mint's response here.
3. Yodlee provides the aggregation engine for both Bank of America and Mint.
4. For more info, see our Online Banking Report on Account Aggregation and Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features

January is always a great month for personal finance. Consumers working off holiday spending binges and/or attempting to live up to New Years resolutions naturally find their way to personal financial management sites. It's especially pronounced this year as consumers try to better understand their spending and manage for the downturn.

So it's not surprising to see that traffic grew by 300,000 unique visitors in January (+20%) compared to December. Total traffic was up 4.5-fold at sites open for a year or more (see Table 1). Including the class of 2008, total traffic was 2.0 million, a five-fold increase from a year ago.

Highlights:

• Mint had another great month, increasing site visitors by about 200,000, a five-fold increase in the past year. Mint's gain in January was more than that total traffic of all nine 2008 newcomers combined. Mint had a 60% market share of the total of 1.8 million visitors in the category, about the same as December. 
• Geezeo continued its wicked pace, growing 30% during the month, and posting a 12-fold increase over a year ago.
• Quicken Online, which launched in January 2008, more than doubled visitors to 150,000 compared to December. However, traffic at Quicken is hard to compare to other sites due to the massive traffic at its parent site: for example, <quicken.intuit.com> received 1.2 million visitors and <intuit.com> website had more than 10 million. 
• Wesabe was the only site, of those open for a year or more, that turned in a traffic decline, falling more than 30% in the month. However, keep in mind the Compete estimates are derived from an online panel and are not always accurate, especially for sites in the low six-figures or less. The company said that it had record page views in January. That includes both U.S. traffic, measured by Compete, and international visitors.
• BudgetTracker also turned in amazing results, nearly doubling its traffic to an estimated 27,000 visitors.
• Of the 2008 startups (see Table 2), Thrive was the only one showing strong growth, increasing 50% over the previous month. On Friday the company was acquired by Lending Tree for an undisclosed amount.

Table 1: Traffic at online PFMs launched more than one year ago

Table 2: Traffic at the online PFM class of 2008

Source: Compete, 7 Feb. 2009; estimates of monthly unique visitors from the United States

*The percent changes were calculated from the underlying data set and due to rounding of the monthly traffic figures; the percentages may look slightly off

Note: For more information on the market, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features and Online Banking Report on Social Personal Finance.

As I was publishing my earlier post on the Thanksgiving message on the Zions Bank homepage, I noticed a small Holiday Gift Planner banner in the lower left corner (see inset below). Expecting to find a pitch for Visa or MasterCard gift cards, I clicked on it and was surprised to find a very cool holiday microsite called at MyHolidayGiftPlanners.com (see screenshot 1 below and note 1).

The gift planner is a personal financial management tool for planning, budgeting, and tracking holiday gift expenditures. Users create a gift list for each person by entering a budget amount per person, an estimated cost for each planned gift, and then later the actual amount spent.

The tool does all the math, tracking progress against each recipients' gift list and how the total holiday budget is faring (see screenshot 2). It even includes a space for capturing gift-buying notes (see below). This year's list will be archived to provide a handy reference for next year. Hopefully, the bank will use email to draw users back next year.

Consumers could do the same thing on a spreadsheet or within most personal finance programs. However, Zions has built an elegant solution that is faster and more convenient. I've always done this for my kids on a piece of paper which I inevitably lose and/or leave out on the table where anyone can read it. I look forward to keeping this list bookmarked and password-protected on my computer this year. 

Anyone can use the program, you needn't be a Zions customers. It takes seconds to sign up inputting name, email address and password (see screenshot 3). The site gently cross sells credit cards to pay for itself. There's a banner that runs across the top of the planning page (screenshot 2) and a link to special cardholder discounts on the main page (screenshot 4).

Zions should turn the planner into an iPhone/Android app to help users track gift purchases on the go and avoid the need to print the list prior to the trip to the mall.

Bottom line: The Zions gift planner is a great example of how to creatively use branded financial management tools to both help customers and create synergy with banking products. We're giving Zions our sixth OBR Best of the Web 2008 award for creating a simple solution to help customers avoid holiday overspending, a pesky personal finance issue that is top-of-mind this year. 

1. Homepage of Zions Bank's gift planner (28 Nov 2008)

2. A credit card cross sell runs across the top of my personalized gift planner

3. Email address is captured for future marketing purposes

4. Credit card discounts are displayed along with an credit card application

Note:

1. Evidently the planner was available in early December last year. The first blog mention was 7 Dec 2007.

In April, we reported on the robust adoption of Bank of America's online personal finance manager, My Portfolio (see note 1), used by 10% of the bank's 25 million online bankers. The results are especially impressive given that it's a full-featured module accessible via online banking, but not particularly well integrated.

In comparison, Wells Fargo offers a completely integrated PFM tool, My Spending Report, that's extremely simple to use, but offers limited functionality. On Oct. 29, the bank made an important improvement, adding a basic budgeting tool, Budget Watch, to what had been essentially a list of transactions divided by category.

The bank told me last week they have 1 million monthly users, making it the second online PFM provider to break the 1-million mark (after BofA). Wells has about 15% of its online banking base (note 2) using the tool, a slightly higher penetration than BofA. Again, not surprising considering how well it is integrated. The budget tools should boost penetration.

Who'll be the next one to join the 1-million club? Mint, with about 500,000 users in its first 15 months in business, is headed that way, possibly as early as late next year.  Chase/WaMu could get there in a few weeks, if they added online personal finance to their feature set. Quicken Online, now that it's free, should get there relatively quickly as well.

Note:
1. BofA's My Portfolio is powered by Yodlee.

2. Excluding Wachovia accounts.

As I was drilling into the latest Compete traffic numbers for the annual Online Banking Report planning issue, I noticed a significant uptick in traffic to online personal finance specialists, almost across the board.

Sept. traffic revealed a total of 1.2 million unique visitors (note 1) compared to less than 400,000 a year ago. Not surprisingly, consumers appear to be taking a closer look at their finances. 

The big three newcomers last year: Mint, Wesabe, and Geezeo saw combined traffic increase by 450,000 users, a nearly three-fold increase from 2007. Geezeo was the star percentage-wise, growing more than six-fold. But Mint accounted for three-fourths of the net gain across the existing players with 330,000 more visitors (see Table 1 below):

Also, two newcomers made a big splash last month:

• PNC Virtual Wallet launched in July (coverage here) by PNC Bank, which trailed only Mint last month with nearly 140,000 unique visitors (see 2 below).
• Rudder (a relaunch of Spendview) drew 50,000 visitors last month after its launch at DEMOfall in early Sept.

Granted, the PNC Virtual Wallet benefits enormously from the 2 million monthly visitors to parent PNC.com and PNCBank.com. Yet, it's still an impressive total and is encouraging for banks and credit unions considering similar efforts.

Table 1: Online PFMs launched more than 1 year ago

Table 2: The online PFM class of 2008

 Notes:

1. Sum of the monthly unique visitors from all PFM companies, visitors that went to more than one PFM provider are not eliminated from the total, so there is double counting in the totals. Data source is Compete, pulled 21 Oct 2008.

2. Rudder was previously Spendview, but we consider them to be essentially a new company.

Drum roll, please. Our final presenter today is Peter Pham, CEO of BillShrink.

Menlo Park, CA-based BillShrink launched its new service in July.

The service is designed to help consumers find the best deal in various categories. Today they showed the credit card selector. The service provides detailed breakdowns of fees and rewards to allow consumers to compare across more than 200 cards in the market.

Launching today is MyAccounts which allows users to track their accounts more easily.

BillShrink also tracks wireless carriers and allows users to find the best mobile phone deals.  

BillShrink announced an $8 million dollar funding today.

The second-to-last presenter today is Thrive from Loudwater Labs. CEO Avi Karnani will be conducting the demo.

New York City-based Thrive is the latest entry in the online personal finance market.

What's New
Thrive is making its official debut today at Finovate. They use a red light/green light system so it's easy to see what needs attention quickly.

Thrive calculates a financial health score from the user's data. Then Thrive shows users specifically how they can improve their score. The recommendations show financial institution products that can be used to achieve cost savings (i.e., product placements such as Mint).

On average they are recommending $1500 worth of savings for users.

Thrive has a wizard to help you see how much house you can afford.

Thrive today is announcing a partnership with Credit.com to allow users to track their credit score over time and improve it.

Mint CEO & Founder Aaron Patzer will be presenting next. 

Online personal finance provider Mint launched a year ago and won a Best of Show award at our first Finovate conference in 2007.

What's new
Mint moves out of beta today, with 500,000 users. Their sign-up rate has more than doubled in the past 3 weeks.

Today they launched new investment tracking functionality that allows Mint users to track their accounts at more than 1000 investment companies, mutual funds, and retirement services.

A unique aspect of its investment tracking is the ability to see the value of the account vs. the cost basis.

Mint has an IRA Rollover Advisor where they are partnering with Fidelity, Scottrade, E*Trade, and Schwab.

Results: 10% of users have changed investment behavior and 50% of users have changed their spending behavior by using Mint.

I'm certain most major PFM providers will have an iPhone app within the next six to 12 months. It's a valuable product extension from a functionality standpoint (see note 1). Even more important are the marketing benefits from blogger/press coverage and the App Store listing itself. 

Mint posted a blog entry last week reviewing ten iPhone finance apps. The post drew two dozen comments, most asking when a Mint app would be released for the iPhone. Mint Product VP Aaron Forth replied, "We are busy working on one now."

Most of the better-funded PFM companies are likely working on an iPhone app, but the approval process at Apple can easily take a month or more (one developer's story is chronicled here). So we expect to see them trickle out over the coming months.

The first established online PFM to make it into the iPhone App Store is Moneytrakin', the Barcelona, Spain-based multi-language, multi-currency PFM (note 2). We covered its launch more than two years ago (here).

The company recently announced it had surpassed 5 million transactions tracked. Assuming 250 per customer, that's 20,000 active users. According to Compete, U.S. website traffic averages 1,000 to 2,000 per month. But many (most?) of Moneytrackin's customers are outside the United States.

The Moneytrackin' program, released on Sept. 19, is currently the seventh most popular app in the Finance category.

Notes:
1. For more information, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features.

2. There are at least a dozen check registers and mini PFMs in the App Store, but none are from established online PFM providers. The only exception is iBuxfer, which claims to work with Buxfer using its API, but was not developed by the company. And in fact, according to the comments in the App Store, may be violating Buxfer's terms of service. All the more reason to get your own app into the store before someone else does.

What a month for financial tech startups! Partly due to DEMOfall, TechCrunch50 and our Finovate, there's been at least 10 online financial service launches or unveilings this month in North America alone (note 1).

That could be the sign of a bubble about to burst, or it could just be a bunch of smart people meeting very real market needs. Only time will tell. 

Lucky number 10 is Pennyminder, an online personal finance startup based in Vancouver, BC. I met founder Vince Hodges at BarCampBankBC last Saturday (coverage here). Although Pennyminder joins a crowded field, the seventh personal finance manager (list below) to launch this month, it's the first ever based out of Canada. That alone should help it gain some traction.

Vince proffered a beta invite, so I've had a chance to look at it. It's a nice, clean design that allows user entries/statement import and supports an expense sharing/social angle. I don't know if that's enough to compete with the dozens of U.S. and international personal finance sites, many with VCs funding a wider range of features, but it's a good start.

Pennyminder will have to figure out a way to break through the clutter, such as partnering with credit unions and/or banks.

Here are six more newcomers this month:

• Thrive unveiled here yesterday and launching at Finovate NYC on Oct. 14
• Rate Surfer unveiled at the TechCrunch50 DemoPit on Sept. 9 and launching at Finovate NYC, Oct. 14 (our coverage here)
• iThryv from Shryk unveiled on stage at TechCrunch50 on Sept. 8 and covered here that day
• Expensify unveiled at the TechCrunch50 DemoPit on Sept. 8 (our coverage here)
• Rudder unveiled here Aug. 23 and launched at DEMOfall on Sept. 8
• GreenSherpa unveiled here July 18 and launched at DEMOfall on Sept. 8

Note:
1. Includes the seven mentioned here plus three more I've yet to blog about.

With three weeks remaining before Finovate NYC, the final company in the demo lineup is stepping out of stealth mode and announcing its participation in our second annual new-products conference. See the full list here.

Thrive will be launching its entry in the online personal finance marketplace, JustThrive.com, at Finovate on Oct. 14. The company hopes to differentiate itself with more advanced financial planning tools while still remaining free. Founder and CEO is Avi Karnani; Marc Matsumoto is CMO.  

Currently, the service is in closed beta testing, but Thrive recently updated its homepage with a timely message playing off last week's financial debacle (screenshot below). 

We had a chance to meet with the NYC-based founders earlier this year and were impressed how they'd studied the current players and were aiming to leapfrog the competition. However, there's been significant innovation in the space this year, and they enter a crowded field (more on that tomorrow).

At this point, I can't say anything more specific about Thrive's plans, but after it becomes publicly available we'll be back with a full analysis. 

Like Rate Surfer, which we wrote about yesterday, Expensify launched its new employee expense-management system from the TechCrunch50 DemoPit this week.

The San Francisco-based startup (note 1) combines a payment card with a Web-based expense manager and uses cellphone cameras to upload pictures of receipts to match against purchases. It's a banking triple play: card, online, and mobile.

The target market is smaller businesses that want to automate expense report preparation, approval, and reimbursement to their employees.  

How it works
The heart of Expensify is a prepaid, decoupled credit card. I know that doesn't make sense, but here's how it works: 

1. Sign up for an Expensify MasterCard prepaid debit card.
2. Load it with value from any credit or debit card, Visa, MasterCard, or American Express. 
3. Make purchases with the Expensify MasterCard.
4. As each purchase clears, the prepaid balance is lowered, triggering an automatic "top off" charge of an equal amount to the consumer's credit card, thereby returning the prepaid balance back to the original level.

Metabank is the issuer; here are terms and conditions.

Analysis
At first blush Expensify sounds pretty amazing. An expense management card that rides on top of your regular card, with mobile and Web-based integration. Brilliant, until you start thinking about costs. There's that pesky thing called interchange. What Expensify has done is create two card transactions instead of one, doubling the amount of interchange paid.

To cover the extra interchange and create some revenue for itself, Expensify levies a 3% transaction fee on the cardholder. Although the card is otherwise relatively fee-free, that's a significant surcharge.

Why would anyone pay 3% extra in order to use the Expensify card when they already have a credit card? The company believes that small businesses will pay the fee in order to get the expense-manager features and to help employees separate business expenses from personal ones. Businesses could have multiple Expensify cards tied to different categories of expenses (see screenshot below).

A business with just $1000/mo in expenditures would pay $360 per year. In addition, the business would tie up several hundred dollars in a prepaid account, because the only charges cardholders can make must not exceed the prepaid balance held in the Expensify account. 

I think the expense-management concept is good, especially with the mobile receipt integration, but it's just too expensive in its current format. The founders should try to move to an ACH-based "topping off" process and remove the transaction fees. 

But regardless of how this specific product performs, the integration of payments, online and mobile, is a huge trend. If Expensify is nimble enough, they may be able to ride the wave.

Expensify homepage (10 Sep 2008)

Note:
1. Since I didn't see contact info on their website, here's what the founders provided at TechCrunch50: Expensify, 548 Market St. #61434, San Francisco, CA 94104, Phone: 801.745.9064

Two huge tech conferences opened today in California with 124 companies launching new products this week in front of a combined audience of more than 2,500 (see note 1). At DEMOfall in San Diego, 72 companies are launching new products today and tomorrow. In San Francisco, 52 companies launch at TechCrunch50 today through Wednesday.

Eight of the 124 companies are related to financial services:

• DEMOfall: Rudder,