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). 

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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.