What Free Online Management Tools Mean to Your Credit Union
Well, I have been waiting for it and it happened - Mint.com has opened it doors for business. Mint.com is a social banking application supported by Yodlee.
With sites like Wesabe.com out there, what can traditional online banking apps really offer the consumer? Not much.
How sad is that? Where is the innovation? Here is a list of the currently available “Social Banking” and online finance management applications (provided by the bright and shiny people at Mashable).
Budget organizers & Financial Planning
Buxfer - Personal money tracking: keep track of how you spend your money and who owes you.
BudgetTracker - track your transactions, bills, income and budget in one place. Organize yourself with BudgetTracker’s calendar and receive notifications of upcoming events.
BudgetPulse - free service that enables you to track your money flow, plan your budget and create fancy looking charts and diagrams. Currently in public beta.
Cyclr - Create “cycles” of money: find others who owe the same amount as you and cancel out each others’ obligations. Currently in private beta testing.
DimeWise - Dimewise is a secure web-based personal finance manager. It’s not free - the services costs $5 per month.
NetWorthIQ - create your financial profile and compare it with other users. Overly aggressive ads might put off some users.
Expensr - a free financial manager that helps you understand where all your money is going. It supports graphs, projections, and some community features like tags and public personal profiles.
I owe you - log, track and share your expenses in various currencies; generate instant reports, and access all this data from anywhere.
Mint - do not confuse this Mint with analytics software Mint from Shaun Inman - these two have nothing in common. Mint is a personal finance organizer which just launched.
Pearbudget - compare what you thought you’d spend to what you’ve really spent; analyze your expenses and save money. Pearbudget is a free desktop application, but a web-based version is currently in beta stage.
BillHighway - Tools for group finances: chapter finances for fraternities and sororities, paying the rent and buying group gifts.
Foonance - A simple, “Web 2.0? money tracking solution: add your “money stores” (places where you keep your money) and log transactions.
Billster - Track personal and group expenses (including standing orders), and set reminders.
SpicyDigits - Track shared and recurring expenses within a group - notifications are sent to group members via email. Free to use.
BillQ - Slick, nicely designed service to keep track of your bills. Like Basecamp for bills.
Mvelopes - Unlike many other services, Mvelopes connects to your bank account (supported banks only) and pulls all your data together on one place. However, pop-up ads for “financial success” courses made us dubious about this one.
Iohu Money - New bill tracking service, currently in private beta testing.
Less Accounting - Expense tracking for small businesses.
BankSwitcher - Makes switching banks or credit unions quick and easy.
Invoice Management
Freshbooks - a tool for tracking time and invoices; allows you to send invoices and receive money via PayPal and Authorize.Net.
BlinkSale - a free online service that lets you create, send and track invoices. It supports data import from Basecamp, CSS customization, and automated invoice sending. Integrates with PayPal for automatic payments.
Cashboard - free financial planner aimed primarily at small businesses. Enables you to create and track invoices and log your financial performance.
SecondSite - another invoice management site with a lot of features, including SSL encryption, data backups and document sharing. Starts with a free plan for 1 user, several for-pay plans are also available.
SimplyBill - create invoices, export them to PDF, send them to clients, track your time, keep track of payments and more with SimplyBill.
Financial Trading & Investment
Gstock - get elementary analysis of buy&sell signals for most stocks on the market.
Motley Fool’s Caps - a rich resource of stock-market related information and tools from one of the better known financial sites on the web, the Motley Fool.
StockCloud - a very simple yet interesting tool, StockCloud shows company tickers in a big tag cloud. A larger ticker symbol means that a company distributes press releases more frequently.
Wikinancial - Test your stock picking strategy and compare it to the rest of the community. There’s no real money, but you can use the knowledge you gain to trade on the real-life stock markets.
DigStock - Digg for stock news: boost good stories to the top.
SaneBull - A “Netvibes for finance” that helps you make trading decisions by putting all the essential data on one page.
ValueWiki - A wiki for stocks. Also includes live chat and a ticker widget for your blog.
Yahoo! Finance - One of the most popular sites for stocks. Includes up to date market info and the ability to create a portfolio.
Google Finance - Google’s rival to Yahoo Finance. A simple layout with Flash graphs and portfolios.
Social Networks
SocialPicks - A social stock-picking community: share ideas with others and track your investments. Includes groups and Digg-like voting on financial news stories.
StockPickr - Get stock ideas and recommendations from a community of investors. Owned by financial news site TheStreet.com.
Wesabe - Community-based money management. You enter your financial data, and Wesabe serves up tips based on the experience of similar users. Your financial data is not shared directly with other users.
Zecco - An online stock broker complete with community features. Trade real stocks - up to 40 trades a month for free, after which fees apply.
BullPoo - Share stock information with a community of investors. Includes blogs, portfolios and forecasts.
RipplePay - An experimental payments system that passes debt between users in an IOU system.
Salary Reports
PayScale - Compare your salary to those with the same job.
WageExchange - a social network where you can anonymously share your salary with other users and see how you stack up.
Online Payment Systems
PayPal - Love it or hate it, Paypal is the leading way to exchange money between individuals online. Owned by eBay.
Google Checkout - Google’s service for buying items in online stores without giving your credit card details to the merchant. No person-to-person exchanges.
MoneyBookers - a popular alternative to PayPal, especially in countries where PayPal still doesn’t let users receive funds.
SO!
What does this all mean? Well it means that your members want finance management tools! They want bells and whistles and gizmos and gadgets! Your members are not computer illiterate - at least the ones who will carry you for the next 40 years aren’t.
You know why I was so excited to hear that Mint.com launched? SMS alerts. This is what they do…
Our alert system is easy-to-use and customizable to your needs. We can alert you via e-mail or text message about the following:
- Low balances in any checking/savings account
- Credit card bill due dates
- Available credit on credit cards
- High/unusual spending by category (i.e. Shopping, Dining, Gas)
- Bank/ATM fees and finance charges
- Large purchases
- Large deposits becoming available
THIS IS A GREAT FEATURE! I love this. You know who else is going to love this? College students, twenty-somethings and other people like me who are just freaks about their account activity. You know all those youth marketing campaigns you are driving yourself crazy trying to pump up their effectiveness? Add some services like this for free to your student checking and they will beat a path to your door (after you let them know of course). The other awesome benefit is that Mint.com works with over 3,000 banks and credit card companies (maybe you should look into getting on that list).
Why should this worry you as a credit union? Here is why:
Save money instantly
Keeping track of the latest and greatest bank accounts and credit card deals so that you aren’t paying more than you should is a full time job, and we’ve made it our job.
Based on your spending habits, we do all the work for you to find you a better deal than what you have now. Simply click on your current accounts to see exactly how much more money you could have if you made the switch. Choose from several providers and compare their offerings.
Yeah, you read that right. THEY will find the best deal for YOUR members. Shouldn’t YOU be doing that?
You need to check out these sites. You need to see what they are offering. Show this list to your team. But before you do, there are two things you should know.
- If anyone tells you this is a bunch of hullabaloo about nothing - put them on the short list for your next staff reorganization. They just do not understand the needs of the members.
- If anyone on your staff (yes anyone) has not HEARD of at least one of these sites - they need to be put on the same list. They are simply not keeping up with the industry and will soon be weighing you down. These sites are not new, they are just getting better.
That’s all for now. I hope I see you all on the other side of this wave.
Edited Sept 21, 2008
Yeah, I guess I am a bit behind the times (well by a week or so anyway). It looks like Wesabe and BankSwitcher are already making it easy for your unhappy members to switch to another FI with a click of the mouse. The good thing is they will let you throw your hat in the ring to maybe pump up your aquisitions. I guess it’s time to blow the dust off those branding manuals and get back to what you are good at - low rates - high dividends and excellent service. Good luck my friends.
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Comments
Tony,
Thank you for putting together such an extensive list. I often wonder how many others are out there that I dont know about. You just gave me about 15 others.
Here is one way CU’s can fight back. Check out MoneyTracker by Jwaala. http://www.jwaala.com This product provides much a lot of functionality including back office marketing benefits that allow you to target market. But most importantly it adds new intriguing features to the institution’s own site.
Mint, Wesabe, Lending Club, etc are HUGE threats. Anyone that doesnt see that is going to suffer in the near term. Those sites pull members away and not only offer them other services but with tools like BankSwitcher allow them to switch extremely easily.
Times have changed and CU’s need to step on the pedal quickly. The online channel is extremely important and upgrading these services with new creative applications can help keep your members coming back.
My 2 cents.
@ Rob - you are exactly right. What I would like to see at bankswitcher is a partnership with Yelp or Google where we can get a “Customer/Member opinion” on the FI much like I can with a camcorder on epinions.com. That is the only way to really make it an apples vs. apples comparison. I wouldn’t make a decision based soley on rates. Plus, between you and me - you need to work on you interface a little. The first thing the site asks for is my email address and my online banking logins. Think about adding some testimonials and some information on the FIs that are particiating like a new customer vs leaving customer ratio. I know your participatin banks may not appreciate it… but I would like to know 
@Tom - I agree. I like Jwaala.com but I don’t think it is 100% where it needs to be yet. It is closeand it looks like a nice tool for CUs. It is way better than some tools I have seen being offered to credit unions for sure! But I like the Mint.com interface and the SMS alerts an the budgeting features. I REALLY like the budgeting features and hope they expand on this product. And the automatic tagging of the transactions (wesabe does a decent job of this but not great).
Thaks for jumping in guys!
I’m getting a little annoyed at mint. Mostly because I can’t successfully log in many times but also because of this blog post: http://www.xmlaficionado.com/2007/09/mint-pomises-to-save-me-35977.html
I’ve experienced something similar but am not willing to take screenshots of it.
I think Shoeboxed.com would go under a nonexistent Receipts category (I think they have a no credit card information policy). There is also mythings which is a worth evaluator (but only after a lot of muscle).
@Alex - yeah there seems to be a problem with Bank of America. I am by no means a shill for Mint. They were ill prepared for the traffic they received. They claim to have received over 100,000 hits in a day and a half and this bogged down their servers and exposed some weaknesses o their team. I am pretty irritated with the BofA issue myself.
As for the magic math - being a programmer myself, I am a little sympathetic. This could have been a one time glitch. I understand that this is still a public “Beta” so I can roll with the glitches. However, my patience will only go so far. They need to get their act together and quickly. If they aren’t on 24-hour shifts right now, they will have been dumped for Wesabe inside of a month.
By the way, I keep bumping into Jason Knight from Wesabe all over the place. A note to Jason - look at what Mint is offering and duplicate them quickly - especially the SMS and budgeting features. Also, fix your tagging - you guys mistagged about 30% of my transactions. That was pretty irritating too.
There is no clear winner so far. I am just excited in the direction the whole thing is going. I think that in a year or 2 there will be some new players with some very innovative ideas.
We are only seeing the beginning!
Thanks for the feedback Tony. We really appreciate it. Right now, we’re scrolling a few customer testimonials on our landing page (www.bankswitcher.com) and we have a short tour users can go through before using BankSwitcher.
Your comment was prescient because to us, helping someone switch banks includes helping them choose a bank or CU. Over the next month or so, we’ll be incrementally adding in features to enable apple-to-apple comparisons, read what others are saying and highlight the best deals.
Hi Tom, thanks for the plug.
Here’s our take on what things like Mint and Wesabe mean for Credit Unions…all wrapped up in a 1 minute video !
If it’s easier for people to switch their primary checking accounts, then the institutions with the best products and services will win the day.