BillMonk Archives

Bank of America Reports 2.5 Million Users of My Portfolio, its Online Personal Finance Tool

By Jim Bruene Posted on April 21, 2008
Categories: Bank of America, BillMonk, Expensr, Geezeo, Market Research & Metrics, Mint, Personal Financial Management, Wesabe, Yodlee

Two months ago we published a table (here) showing active users at the leading online personal finance startups. Below is the table, updated with March traffic and the addition of one more player: Bank of America.

The bank, which offers a full-featured online personal finance management solution called My Portfolio, powered by Yodlee, has 2.5 million active users, according to BofA exec Marina Moore (note 3). That's an impressive 10% of the bank's online user base, and about 6x the total user base of all the online startups combined (note 4).

Company	Users (1)	% of Total	March Traffic(2)	Jan Traffic(2)	Chg
Bank of America	2.5 million	86%	—	—	—
Mint	180,000	6%	160,000	150,000	7%
Wesabe	100,000	3%	28,000	41,000	(32%)
Buxfer	80,000	3%	8,400	9,200	(9%)
Geezeo	20,000+	0.7%	8,400	14,000	(40%)
NetWorthIQ	13,000	0.5%	10,000	11,000	(10%)
BillMonk	10,000+	0.3%	1,700	1,000	+70%
Expensr	Five figs	0.3%+	2,000	1,700	+18%
Total	2.9 million	100%

For more information:

Online Banking Report (131/132): Personal Finance Features for Online Banking
Online Banking Report (142/143): Social Personal Finance
Our FinovateStartup Conference April 29 in San Francisco, where Buxfer, Expensr, Jwaala, Mint, and Wesabe will present the latest in online personal finance features

Notes/Sources:

1. Users: per BusinessWeek Online, Feb 2008, figures are reported by the companies and may include inactive users; Mint has been updated to 180,000 from 130,00 based on new figures reported in the Bank Technology News article published in April 2008

2. Traffic: per Compete estimates of website traffic for March 2008, retrieved April 21, 2008. Compete estimates traffic from its online data and can be off by a factor of two or three-fold for smaller websites.

3. As reported in a Bank Technology News article published in April 2008.

4. This table does not reflect all the players, such as Intuit's new Quicken Online, just the ones highlighted in the BusinessWeek article.

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400,000 Users at Online Personal Finance Startups

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 22, 2008
Categories: BillMonk, Buxfer, Expensr, Geezeo, Mint, Personal Financial Management, Wesabe

In a Feb. 11 BusinessWeek Online feature (here), reporter John Tozzi listed the self-reported user bases at seven new entrants in online personal finance. The roundup led with an anecdote about Wesabe CEO Jason Knight answering phone calls from users (see inset).

The seven companies listed below are only a subset of the online personal finance space. The list does not include users at Quicken Online, Yodlee, Mvelopes, and another two dozen smaller players. Nor does it include users at financial institutions that support online personal financial management such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Key Bank, River City Bank and others.

Company	Users	Traffic
Mint*	135,000	150,000
Wesabe*	100,000	41,000
Buxfer*	80,000	9,200
Geezeo	20,000+	14,000
NetWorthIQ	13,000	11,000
BillMonk	10,000+	1,000
Expensr*	Five figures	1,700
Total	370,000+	230,000

Sources: Users per BusinessWeek Online, Feb 2008, figures are reported by the companies and may include inactive users; Traffic: Compete, Inc, estimated unique visitors for January 2008

*Will be presenting at our FINOVATE Startup conference April 29, 2008

For more information:

Previous NetBanker coverage here
Online Banking Report #131/132: Personal Finance Features for Online Banking
Online Banking Report #142/143: Social Personal Finance

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Facebook Launches MoochSpot, a “Social Loan” Tracker

By Jim Bruene Posted on September 8, 2006
Categories: Bank 2.0, BillMonk, Epayments, Facebook, Personal Financial Management

In mid-August, Facebook, the popular social networking site aimed at college students, alums, and now a few select corporations has released a simple personal finance application. The original name was FaceBank (see screenshot at bottom of article), but recently it was renamed MoochSpot (click on screenshot below for closeup).

MoochSpot allows Facebook users to loan (i.e., spot), borrow (mooch), and settle debts with other Facebook users. At this point there is no payment capabilities, so the money must change hands through other methods.

Here's how it works:

Create a "piggy bank" to track the funds
Select a Facebook friend from the list that automatically shows in the MoochSpot list (note, in our screenshot below, we don't have any predesignated friends, so the list is empty)
Enter the amount of the loan
(Optional) Enter a reason for the loan

Analysis
MoochSpot was developed, not because of huge user demand to track personal debts, but to showcase the type of application that can be built by outside developers using the recently released Facebook APIs. MoochSpot is highlighted on the Facebook developer's page <developers.facebook.com>.

BillMonk, the self-proclaimed "social money" site which allows debts to be split and tracked via website or mobile phone (see NB Apr 30), is the first financial services provider to jump on the bandwagon and create Facebook integration (in inset, see Facebook login in lower-right of BillMonk's homepage). We tried on several computers to get it to work and were unable to get past the Facebook login. We'll check back in a few days to see if they have the bugs worked out.

Financial institutions looking to create online banking sites that click with college students should pay close attention to BillMonk and MoochSpot. It would be relatively simple for a bank to use the Facebook API to develop even more powerful payment applications that combine the loan-tracking benefits of MoochSpot with actual epayment capabilities to move money back and forth among friends. While it wouldn't do anything that Paypal doesn't do today, the integration within online banking is important.

But the biggest reason to integrate with Facebook, MySpace, or any other 20-something social network is because it positions yourself as a bank or CU that understands the younger generation. And make sure you have genuine 20-somethings designing the marketing and writing the blog copy.

Appendix:

Below is the original FaceBank application prior to changing the name to MoochSpot:

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Financial Mashups like Billmonk

By Jim Bruene Posted on April 30, 2006
Categories: Account Aggregation, BillMonk, Epayments, PayPal, uMonitor, Yodlee

In the musical world, a mashup combines music from one song with lyrics from another, often mixing two very different genres. One of the more famous examples is the Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse that put words from Jay-Z's Black Album on top of chords from The Beatles White Album.

Programmers have their own definition: combining content seamlessly from two different sources. For example, Kayak <kayak.com> is a powerful travel site that pulls price quotes out of hundreds of websites and displays them in tabular format and locates them visually on a Google Map (click on the inset to see a Las Vegas hotel search).

In online finance, we have seen mashups from Yodlee, uMonitor, and others that marry account information from a number of sources to create an aggregated view. But the most successful financial mashup yet is PayPal, which put an email/Web interface in front of two established electronic payment mechanisms, ACH and MasterCard/Visa.

Who will launch the next successful mashup? There is quite a bit of activity in the payments space, many trying to mimic PayPal's success using a cell phone interface. For example Obopay and TextPayMe (NetBanker, April 26), and BillMyCell from Black Lab Mobile <blacklabmobile.com>.

Another company, BillMonk <billmonk.com> has created a Web-based system of sharing expenses designed for the work-hard, play-hard urban singles set. Users can send expenses to be shared to their account at BillMonk using text messages, and then log in later to finalize the payment split and let everyone know who owes what (see example right). The company doesn't yet facilitate the actual payment, but they are looking for a partner to power the financial transactions.

We're still not convinced the market for "splitting expenses among friends" is big enough to sustain one, let alone four service providers (see NetBanker, April 26). But we ARE sure the enterprising founders of BillMonk will find a niche somewhere in the payments space.

BillMonk has added more new features to its bill-sharing platform in the past four months than most companies implement in four years. It reminds us of the pace at another small payments company that we were watching closely six years ago as they morphed from a closed PDA-to-PDA payment system to the primary platform for eBay buyers (see Online Banking Report #54 for a view of PayPal in the early days).

To get an idea of the pace at BillMonk, read a few entries from their blog <billmonk.wordpress.com>. Then realize that this is not the work of a vast team of programmers, PR agents, and marketers. It's just two guys in a Seattle apartment who are also answering customer queries, paying the bills, building the website, taking out the trash, and talking to reporters (see the profile in the Seattle Times, April 24).

Action Items
My advice for financial institutions:

Hire these guys
If that's not practical, then behave like them; constantly improving your website and to the extent you control it, your online banking and bill pay system

I will bring you an update on the company as soon as I can corner one or both of the founders in a coffee shop.

—JB

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