Launches Archives - Page 3 of 6

Launching: Will Ebilling Startup Doxo Become a Household Word?

By Jim Bruene Posted on October 22, 2010
Categories: Bill payment, Doxo, Electronic Bill Payment & Presentment, Electronic Statements, Launches

The Internet has already yielded some great solutions for a number of modern-day consumer problems.

Finding info: Google
Purchasing and organizing music: Apple iTunes + iPod
Keeping track of your friends: Facebook
Booking travel: Expedia and others
Getting rid of stuff: eBay and Craigslist
Paying for it: PayPal
Tracking your money: Online banking

But despite all these advances, does anyone feel like they are more organized today than they were 10 or 15 years ago? Most of us still deal with stacks of paper bills, receipts, statements, privacy notices, along with emails, alerts, and the occasional voice message from our service providers. And if we forget to pay someone, the financial consequences can be huge. So, it’s no wonder we decide to keep the paper statements coming to help us remember to pay each bill.

The company that solves the paper-based “organizational mess” could be the next big thing online. While it’s way too early to project a winner, a Seattle-based startup launching this week has as good a chance of taming the paper beast as anyone I’ve ever seen. The company is Doxo, which I wrote about briefly this summer (see note 1 for invites). The company’s DNA is Qpass, an early billing and payments company sold to Amdocs in 2006 for $275 mil. Co-founders Steve Shivers, Mark Goris and Roger Parks all worked at Qpass.

Here’s Doxo’s service in a nutshell, using the Facebook metaphor:

Create a secure place online where bills can be stored; let’s call it Facebills.com
Allow authorized biller “friends” to communicate directly to their customers via Facebills.com, this includes sending the bill itself, plus customer service and marketing communications
Once the biller and end-user are friends, turn off the pesky paper statements and store everything forever, for free, on the platform

The business model:

Consumers pay nothing
No advertising (other than marketing message from biller “friends”)
Billers pay for the entire platform since it costs them a fraction of what they pay today sending paper bills and processing payments

Why would billers pay for it?

It’s a fraction of the cost of paper + postage
Adoption of estatements has stalled at 10% to 15% of consumers even for billers who’ve worked relentlessly to get rid of paper; and the easy way to get adoption, charging for paper statements, gets both consumers and politicians all worked up
The Doxo platform provides a direct, secure communications path to end users, including marketing messages
No advertising from competitors makes Doxo more desirable than other third-party systems where billing info might end up residing (e.g., Google/Gmail, Mint, etc.)
The network effect; managing multiple bills in one place is the carrot to get consumers to give up the paper

What’s missing?

Billers are not yet on the system in this private-beta release (note 1). Users can set up pages for each biller and populate it with their account info and uploaded statements. This is a temporary limitation; I’ve been assured that some big-name billers are on the way.
It’s currently a read-only system, meaning there’s no way to pay the bill. Eventually, it makes much more sense to allow customers not only to receive the bill, but also to pay it from within Doxo.

Why it could be huge: This is a classic “network” play. The more billers on the system, the more the consumer benefits and vice versa. Whoever gets this system to scale first will enjoy an enormous “eBay” network effect which will be difficult to dislodge. CheckFree/Fiserv and others have been down this road but have not achieved critical mass, leaving the door open for an aggressive startup to fill the void.

I like what I see at Doxo. And not just its slick UI. I’ve interviewed company execs several times and they have this thing nailed, at least in theory. The user-experience is great, assuming the startup brings in the billers. And the biller’s business case is a no-brainer, if Doxo scores the end-users. We’ll know it has a good shot when a half-dozen big-name billers come on board.

Why it could lose: Consumers are absolutely not looking for another place to manage their bills. And very few care enough about it to do a lot of work populating a website with account info. Finally, until the portal develops a recognized brand, users won’t trust it. It’s critical that a few big billers endorse Doxo to get it jump-started. Even then, end-users may simply not be willing to spend the few minutes it takes to get set up on Doxo.

Bottom line: I love it and want all my bills to go here now. So here’s to being able to “doxo” statements to me sometime very soon.

————————————

Electronic biller page at Doxo for fictional Goliath Bank (21 Oct 2010)
Note: The “To Do” tab is where account statements are delivered

Doxo inbox for receiving statements and other communications

Doxo storage area for filed statements
Note: Users can upload their own electronic documents to supplement (or in lieu of) those received through the Doxo platform

Note:
1. The company has tweeted that it will hand out invites to its followers on Twitter.com/doxo. Update: Doxo sent us some invite codes, use “netbanker” as your access code.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Mobile Phones Just Keep Getting Smarter: Now Used as an Electronic Key Card at Holiday Inns

By Jim Bruene Posted on September 22, 2010
Categories: Launches, Mobile Banking, Mobile Commerce, Mobile Payments

I love September. When I was a kid it was the excitement of going back to school, a new football season, wonderful Midwest weather, plus my birthday to boot.

Nowadays the birthday isn’t so much fun, but the weather is still fine and it’s like Christmas for new tech products. I can’t prove it, but I bet there are more major product announcements in Sep/Oct/Nov than the rest of the year combined.

This month already, 70 new tech products launched at DEMO last week, and several dozen will debut at TechCrunch Disrupt next week. Then, of course, we have 56 new financial launches at Finovate, Oct 4/5 (which unfortunately is sold out).

Today alone, there were at least six new things I would have liked to blog about. Maybe I can get some of them into my Twitter feed at least. I have chosen the one that was the biggest “aha” moment of the day. The seemingly off topic, but oh-so-cool service, that can turn any mobile phone, yes even those low-end freebies, into an electronic hotel room key. And without any additional hardware/case/SIM/SD card or anything. It’s like magic. Watch.

They use sound to engage the lock. Aha! Would I trust the thing? Probably not, but I’d use it anyway. The key benefit (pun intended) is that you get to bypass the endless lobby check-in queue when you arrive at the hotel and simply proceed directly to your room. For that, I’d take the risk that it didn’t work. Besides, four times in my life I’ve been given a key card at the front desk that opened up on a room already occupied (see note 1), so this system can’t be any worse.

The system, called MobileKey, is being piloted for the next three months at a Holiday Inn in Chicago and Houston. It’s powered by OpenWays. When using the service, the hotel sends the guest a text message with a link that plays a unique sound that opens the door. Brilliant!

Relevance: When your phone becomes your Starbucks card, then your airline boarding pass, and now your hotel room key, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a mobile wallet, not only controlling your bank accounts, but also used at the point of sale for purchases.

Notes:
1. Does this happen to everyone or am I just cursed? At least three times the door was not deadbolted from inside, so I actually went partway in to the room. Once I was politely told to go away, once I was screamed at by a fellow whom I’d awakened after midnight, once the occupant was in the shower so I quickly backed out, and the fourth time there were dishes out front so I called the front desk first. Anyway, I always knock before going into my room the first time.
2. HT ReadWriteWeb

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

BankSimple May be First Invite-Only Retail Bank Launch

By Jim Bruene Posted on September 14, 2010
Categories: Launches, Simple

I’m not sure what BankSimple told investors, but it worked. The non-bank bank startup grabbed $3 million in VC money last week. The company is positioning itself as a tech company rather than a financial services provider, a smart move for valuations.

I finally caught up with co-founder Joshua Reich a few days ago. I came away from that conversation even more impressed. These guys are really trying to reshape the banking experience. They talk more like a credit union than a bank, meaning they are maximizing the customer experience instead of the shareholder one (see note 1).

Granted it hasn’t launched yet, but so far the “better experience” strategy is working wonderfully. The startup has a 20,000-person wait list for an account. Think about that, a waiting list…to join a bank. I never thought I’d write that sentence. If 75% convert to actual customers, BankSimple will have already hit its first-year goal. A nice problem to have.

And the beauty of so-called scarcity marketing is that you can use invite codes as a sort of virtual currency to reward existing customers and other influencers. BankSimple plans to use invite codes to encourage certain unspecified behaviors from existing customers. It’s a page out of the Silicon Valley playbook. Google kept Gmail invite-only for several years. There was a even a time where people paid real money on eBay for a Gmail invite. The same could happen at BankSimple.

Other things I learned:

42% of its prospect base already uses Mint, so BankSimple is content to let someone else handle the heavy lifting in the aggregation space. At launch anyway, they will show activity only with direct BankSimple partners.
As previously reported, the bank is committed to mobile remote deposit. They’ve spent considerable time working the kinks out of that. They even looked at extending the concept to bill payment, allowing users to simply scan bills and have them automatically paid; however, too many tech problems surfaced, so the effort has been shelved.
Focused on real-time everything. They may be the first bank (at least in the United States) to have everything they do occur in real time. They think that will greatly reduce customer service headaches and expense.

Notes:
1. But clearly BankSimple is no nonprofit. The VCs are there because they smell a 10x return, not because they don’t like banking fees.
2. Photo credit: The Bank nightclub in Las Vegas.
3. Previous posts on BankSimple here.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

New Online Banking Report Published: Email Banking – Revitalizing the Channel

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 23, 2010
Categories: Alerts & Messaging, Electronic Statements, Launches, Online Banking Report

Each day, the typical consumer household completes several banking and credit/debit card transactions. And 99% of the time, the transactions require little extra attention other than mentally checking them off to ensure you aren’t a victim of fraud, or more likely, human error.

But to stay on top of that routine activity, Americans collectively make hundreds of millions of visits to banking websites each month. This, my friends, is not an efficient use of time.

And it’s mostly unnecessary. There’s really no reason to log in every week to manage my accounts. All the info I really need could be sent to me via email.

That would eliminate the need for most website visits. And if I could initiate transactions right from the email, I’d only need to visit the website every few months to tweak my settings (even that could potentially be done through email interactions).

But as pervasive as email (and text) alerts have become, they are often cryptic messages that make you feel less certain of your finances, creating more anxiety and more website visits (see note 1). This is not what you want from financial providers.

What’s missing is a rich email experience, where a balance summary message can be expanded into a full statement with the click of a link. Where key supporting actions, such as paying a bill, are imbedded in the message. And where it’s easy to resolve issues immediately while you are thinking about them, rather than moving to another channel later on.

That’s the promise of Email Banking that we explore in the current report (see below). We also look at a new Israeli startup, ActivePath, that is delivering much of this vision with its new email banking service launching in the U.S. later this year (note 2). The screenshot below shows how a password-protected daily account-summary email can become a full-featured account-management tool with numerous links to act on the information presented.

Finally, in an addendum to last month’s report on email/text alerts, we look at the alert-control panels at five major banks: Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo.

About the report:

———————————————————————————————-

Email banking: revitalizing the channel (link)
New technologies and more thoughtful design could elevate email
to a central role in account management

Author: Jim Bruene, Editor & Founder

Published: 19 Aug 2010

Length: 40 pages

Cost: No extra charge to OBR subscribers, $395 for others here

———————————————————————————————-

Daily account summary email from ActivePath
Note: Embedded buttons to a.) view transactions, b.) role money into a CD,
c.) transfer funds, d.) view transaction detail, e.) chat with customer service

Notes:
1. For more on email alerts, see last month’s Online Banking Report: Email Alerts & Transaction Streaming.
2. See ActivePath, along with 55 other innovators, at FinovateFall, Oct. 4/5 in NYC.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Launching: Doxo Looks to Dramatically Improve the Ebilling Experience

By Jim Bruene Posted on August 19, 2010
Categories: Doxo, Electronic Bill Payment & Presentment, Electronic Statements, Launches

Two significant Seattle-based financial startups are gearing up for launch, something I haven’t been able to say since the bubble days. We looked at location-based transaction monitoring company Finsphere last week. Today, we take a peek at Doxo, which is looking to disrupt the ebilling market and bring transactional paper mail into the 21st century.

I met with CEO Steve Shivers and Marketing VP Kevin Frisch last week in their new Pioneer Square office, a nifty location recently vacated by Microsoft. While public details are limited, I’ve had two briefings with the firm and can say that if it works, it could be one of the biggest financial plays in many, many years. Like Finsphere, Doxo is backed by Mohr Davidow Ventures and Bezos Expeditions.

Of course, the ebilling space is littered with failures including many well-funded ventures that pretty much all ended up being acquired by CheckFree (now Fiserv): MSFDC/TransPoint (Microsoft, First Data, and Citibank), Spectrum (Wells Fargo, First Union, and Chase) and Integrion (IBM and 17 banks) to name just a few. And the ebilling service at Fiserv isn’t exactly blowing the doors off, delivering 320 million bills each year (2009), just a sliver of the 40 to 50 billion sent annually in the United States.

All I can say about the startup is that they are creating an online hub where billers can send bills and communicate with customers in a much better way than through snail mail. It’s put together in a way that could really speed estatement adoption. And it’s funded by the billers, who save money immediately by eliminating paper statements to participants.

As demonstrated by the history of failed ebilling ventures, there are huge obstacles to overcome. But the time may be right for ebilling to finally take off. Billers are frustrated with low levels of estatement adoption, consumers are fed up with redundant email and paper communications, and no one wants to waste natural resources (and money) if there’s a viable alternative.

No one has yet figured out how to solve it. Doxo may have the answer. Stay tuned.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Launches: Swipely is a Yelp/Twitter/Bankcard Mash-up

By Jim Bruene Posted on June 8, 2010
Categories: Alerts & Messaging, Blippy, Launches, Social Networks

This week I received an invitation to Swipely’s closed beta (request one here). As a fan of its closest competitor, OBR Best of the Web winner, Blippy (note 1), I’ve been looking forward to testing out the newest entrant.

Both services allow you to register ecommerce accounts, including credit or debit cards, so that transactions can be streamed to your friends and family, or the whole world if you so choose (note 2). Detractors cannot figure out why anyone would want to do that, but that’s also what people said about Twitter, which is now approaching 200 million worldwide monthly visitors.

But I’m convinced the naysayers simply haven’t used Blippy or Swipely. The startups are simply convenient platforms for sharing interesting experiences, downloads, or purchases. It’s not the collapse of privacy as we know it (that would be Facebook). The typical Blippy/Swipely user might stream their Netflix queue, iPhone downloads, or a meal eaten at a local favorite.

Contrary to what you might read, there is very little oversharing. Generic posts such as “spent $7.29 at CVS” are rare. Sure those people exist, just like the Twitter users sharing what they had for breakfast, but they are the exception. Like Yelp or Facebook, most users strive to share things that are interesting to both them and others (note 3).

Providence, RI-based Swipely, which has already raised $8.5 million in capital, encourages users to comment and rate purchases on a 5-point scale. If it catches on, Swipely could build a database of user experiences and merchant ratings that challenges Yelp or TripAdvisor (note 4).

Bottom line: Will the services prosper? I think semi-automated transaction sharing is here to stay and will become a standard feature in larger social communities, e.g., Facebook, Twitter and Yelp. It also makes sense as part of larger OFM/PFM efforts (note 5).

I also think there is a place for limited transaction sharing among customers of financial institutions, primarily among joint account holders and employees of smaller businesses (see previous post).

On the other hand, I’m not sure if Blippy/Swipely will become popular destinations on their own. It’s more likely they’ll end up powering services baked into other sites. That said, if the startups can figure out how to get the Internet masses to make the effort to rate and post millions of transactions, they could become household names.

Swipely transaction stream across all users (7 June 2010)
Note: My just-posted transaction is at the top of the stream

Notes:
1. See Blippy’s FinovateSpring 2010 demo here; see previous posts here.
2. Swipely doesn’t currently support direct downloads from ecommerce accounts, but you can forward email receipts to the service for posting.
3. Both services offer a mix of automation and manual entry to make sure the posting process isn’t too much of a burden, but keeps things relevant. On Swipely, the default privacy setting is for the user to manually approve each transaction before it is posted. And in contrast to Blippy, the amount of the transaction is NOT included in the post.
4. You can understand why the VCs are investing.
5. See our most recent Online Banking Report for more on Online Financial Management Features for Online Banking.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Lifehacker, Bank Technology News Spread the BankSimple Meme

By Jim Bruene Posted on June 5, 2010
Categories: Launches, Market Research & Metrics, Simple

BankSimple has already become well known among the digerati and its notoriety is spreading to the mainstream press (here and here). Bank Simple’s latest PR coup was being named Tuesday to the Bank Technology News annual top-20 innovators list (see note 1).

Quite a feat for a company that hasn’t yet launched or even shown its service outside a small group of testers (note 2).

Lifehacker Asks, “Are you happy with your bank?”
Lifehacker, a popular blog (note 3) that deals with personal productivity and other minutiae of day-to-day living, positioned the BankSimple story as a backlash against traditional banks in a post titled, “Are You Happy with Your Bank?”

After a few speculative paragraphs about Bank Simple, the blog concluded with a quick poll to see how motivated its readers were to switch banks. I expected this self-selected sample to be very anti-bank. But surprisingly, more than half the 3900 voters declared themselves relatively satisfied with their bank. Only 13% said they were unhappy and another 30% said they’d consider consider switching.

Given the sample bias, you can’t read too much into the the data. But it does demonstrate that even in a worst-case polling situation — where participants are pre-conditioned with a vision of a utopian entity that does everything right with nary a fee — it’s still difficult to budge consumers away from their existing bank/credit union.

Notes:
1. Four recent Finovate alums were also listed: Backbase, CashEdge, Intuit, and Segmint (see our Finovate blog post yesterday).
2. If you read all the published articles, a fairly thorough picture of Bank Simple emerges. It will not be a bank, but a simple web 2.0 interface (e.g., Twitter/Tumblr) on top of a checking account (e.g., what PayPal did for online payments ten years ago).
3. According to Compete, Lifehacker averages about 1.2 to 1.5 million unique U.S. visitors each month.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Launches: Piggymojo Taps Twitter and SMS to Track Everyday Savings Success

By Jim Bruene Posted on June 1, 2010
Categories: Deposits, Checking, Savings, CDs, Launches, Mobile Banking, Text banking, Twitter

Who hasn’t played this game? “If I give up x, I can justify buying y.” At our house, after two decades the game is mostly now limited to big-ticket items. For example, “If we don’t replace our 11-year old Toyota, we can take a summer trip to the U.S. Open.”

The basic premise is that the extra three grand you DON’T spend on the new car essentially pays for the vacation, making it seemingly “free” and more guilt-free. It’s a common and powerful principal of consumer behavior.

Piggymojo’s just-launched service taps into this psychology and gives it a mobile twist. The startup uses text/Tweet-based data input so it’s easy to track all the expenses you’ve avoided during the day. And because it takes just a few seconds to tap out a message, the principal can be used to track even trivial daily savings that can add up over time.

For example, if you decide to start brown bagging lunch instead of hitting your normal lunch spots, you can track the savings by Tweeting/texting to your Piggy Mojo account:

Packed own lunch, saved $5 (or on Twitter, “d piggymojo 5 lunch not out”)

Drank free office coffee, saved $2.75

Read office newspaper, saved $1

The service collects all these messages and tracks the total amount “saved.” The totals can be applied to various savings goals to measure progress. The site uses a unique photo mosaic to visually represent goal progress. You can choose from dozens of exisiting photos or upload your own. As you build your savings, the photo gradually fills in until it’s complete (see screenshot below).

You can add your spouse/partner to the account so both of you can contribute towards the savings. There’s also a way to set up “recurring savings” so you don’t have to constantly text repetitive items. For example, if you cancelled your cable TV, you can input the amount saved once at the Piggymojo site and it will automatically credit your account each month (see second screenshot).

There’s also a social piece, allowing you to bring friends and family into the fold. Piggy Mojo will automatically send them a weekly progress report on your goal, providing that all-important peer pressure to your spending discipline.

Relevance for netbankers
Currently, the site is not hooked to an actual bank/CU savings account. The user is responsible for actually moving these fictitious savings amounts to a real savings account for later use. But this concept would be much more powerful if every time you texted “saved $6 at lunch” that six bucks were actually transferred from checking to savings.

Piggy mojo goal-tracking via completing picture of your goal (1 June 2010)
Note: The arrows point to the color sections that have been completed, visually demonstrating that I’m about 7% of the way to the goal

Recurring savings input form

Notes:
1. HT: Credit Karma blog
2. For more info, see our Online Banking Report, where we wrote about various ways to leverage your online/mobile channel to boost deposits in late 2008 (here).

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

What is Bank Simple?

By Jim Bruene Posted on May 18, 2010
Categories: Alt Payments, Bank 2.0, Launches, Twitter, Website Usability & Design

There’s a new “banking entity” in formation, Brooklyn, NY-based Bank Simple operating (temporarily I assume) at the .net version of its name <banksimple.net>. I chatted with the founders, Josh Reich and Shamir Karkal earlier this year and am anxiously awaiting more info on the launch.

From reading its trademark application, website, and blog, I have a feeling Bank Simple will launch as a banking front-end (eg. Mint, Obopay), and not as an actual bank. Given the market’s (and Washington’s) appetite for startup banks right now, they may have little choice. But who knows where they go from there. It sounds like they want tight control over the user experience, so they may eventually need to be a bank.

But from their FAQs and a few tidbits found through deep Googling, it sounds like Bank Simple will be much more than web-based software. Initially, it is launching a card-based service with combined debit/credit and rewards built in (de-coupled debit again?). Here’s what they say in the About section:

We will launch later this year with a simple card with in built checking, savings, rewards and a line of credit. As we add more competitive banking services, you can personalize your features as your needs change.

Bank Simple talks about customer service (answering the phone), taking deposits by mail (and this is a rumor, by mobile remote deposit) and other traditional banking activities. So that is much more than an online PFM (can we agree to call that OFM?).

They made the tech press this week when they added a new co-founder, Alex Payne, one of early engineers at Twitter. So expect streaming information, ala Blippy and Swipely, and social networking to be a crucial part of the mix.

The startup is looking for summer marketing interns, but there are no permanent jobs posted, another reason to believe they will not be operating a full-blown bank in the near term.

It sounds like a good plan. Marry the utility of PayPal with user experience of ING Direct. Throw in a little Mint-like design and some Twitter hype, and it’s a VC’s dream.

Bank Simple’s pre-launch placeholder homepage (18 May 2010)
Note: Site is in closed beta, request an invitation through the “join” button

Note: In Online Banking Report, we have written about creating a virtual bank, sans the charter, several times in the past 15 years. The most recent full report was in Oct. 2000, Creating the Amazon.com of Financial Services. But we updated the tables (now called Creating the Facebook of Financial Services) last year in our 2010 Planning Guide.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Now That’s Payments Innovation: Parkzing Puts Your Parking Tickets on Autopilot

By Jim Bruene Posted on April 18, 2010
Categories: Alt Payments, Bill payment, Credit/Debit Cards, Launches

When talking about payments innovation in the 21st century, PayPal is usually the first thing that comes to mind. The company took existing payment methods (debit, credit, and electronic/ACH transfer) and used the Internet for delivery and messaging. Ten years later it is one of a handful of financial companies that can claim nine-figure customer bases.

And there are dozens (hundreds?) of companies working on creating their own PayPal in relatively new frontiers: mobile, social networks, health care, micropayments, and so on. We’ll have several of them demoing at our upcoming FinovateSpring event May 11 (lineup here).

But you don’t need millions of users to create something of value. Case in point: Parkzing is a new service (with a great name) created in his spare time by Aren Sanderson, CTO of Third Ave Labs, the creator of mobile app discovery service Apptizer (great name #2).

Parkzing is a mostly free service that removes the hassle, and worry, from remembering to pay your parking fines. How it works:

Users register their license plate number with the service
Parkzing scans city parking fine databases daily
If it finds a match, it contacts the user with a reminder to pay; reminders continue until the fine is removed from the database
Optionally, users can give Parkzing their credit card number and the ticket will automatically be paid for a very economical $5 per ticket fee (see note 1)

This is one of those ideas that is so simple, yet so valuable, that you cannot believe it wasn’t invented the day that city databases went public. As you might suspect, not all cities post this info online, so it currently only helps those in San Francisco, Washington D.C. and NYC (request your city here).

Relevance to Netbankers: This would be a valuable service to offer online/mobile banking customers. It would differentiate you from the competition, help fill your city’s coffers, and add value to your payments card(s). The main downside? Liability for technical glitches that cause fines to go unpaid. A nominal fee for the service could fund a payments guarantee and provide a small bit of revenue.

Also, think about the bigger picture here. Why limit this to parking tickets? How about if my bill-pay provider scanned all my accounts every day and told me what I owed? Utilities, credit cards, school lunch account, the dentist, and so on. To some extent Mint, Yodlee and the other PFM/bill-pay players already do this. But as Parkzing demonstrated, there’s still room for innovations in bill pay.

Note:
1. Five bucks is incredibly low considering the convenience and the savings in late fees; in Seattle we owe an extra $25 after only 15 days. I’d be willing to pay $25 per year + $5/ticket for the service.
2. HT to VentureBeat for writing about it.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

The Second New PFM of 2010 Launches at DEMO: In & Out Cash Management Systems

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 22, 2010
Categories: Launches, Personal Financial Management

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.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Launching: HelloWallet is First New PFM of 2010

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 8, 2010
Categories: Launches, Personal Financial Management

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.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook