Check Your Financial Info Anytime, Anywhere

By Terry Savage
TheStreet.com Contributor
8/26/2007 10:19 AM EDT

The next generation of financial organization has arrived. It's called Geezeo. And it means you can get to your personal financial information anywhere, at any time.

If you're away from home you can easily find your current checking account and credit card balances -- even if you don't have access to a computer. Now with a discreet glance at your cell phone, you can have all your financial information literally at your fingertips.

It's the next stage in real-time access. Geezeo puts you in control of your money by giving you real-time access to your accounts at thousands of banks and credit card companies through text messaging. Having that information could save you from huge overdraft and over-limit fees. It could even save you the embarrassment of having your credit card rejected when you reach to pay for dinner.

Text messaging of your account balances is the latest development at www.geezeo.com, a personal finance Web site that declares itself to be a "social finance" destination. The finance aspect is the fact that they securely aggregate your financial data from major banks and credit card companies, and soon will include mutual fund and brokerage firms. The "social" portion of the personal finance site is a series of online discussion groups, where peers discuss issues ranging from credit to investing.

That , in itself, is a significant difference from most personal finance software, which allows you to view your data securely, but in solitude. Geezeo.com lets you keep your financial information private but facilitates communication with others in the community to help you make financial decisions. Tools at the site help track your progress as you pay down debt or save for the future, as well as share ideas with others who have similar goals.

Personal finance sites that revolve around "social networking" in general are becoming very popular. For example, www.networthiq.com allows you to post your financial information -- including cash, investments, debt, etc. -- for all to see and comment upon. It requires users to manually update monthly balances. Another social networking site, www.Mint.com, allows bloggers to share stories about their personal finances. And www.Wesabe.com is a site for group networking about personal finance topics. Geezeo.com is the only one that securely and privately aggregates your own data on a daily basis by either downloading or "scraping" balances from all the sites to which you have authorized access.

But the truly breakthrough technology is the fact that you can now gain access to all this information in real time on your cell phone -- any text enabled cell phone. In effect, your mobile phone becomes an extension of the Web site.

It's a technology that is aimed directly at the 18-to-35 age group that is actively using text messaging. But don't let the youthful aspect of this concept fool you. Two-way mobile banking is the wave of the future.

Getting Geezeo Started

The two most important things you need to know about Geezeo.com can be said in one short sentence: Geezeo is free and it is secure.

The security is at the same high level as online banking Web sites. Geezeo does not store your personal account numbers, nor your passwords that gain access to your bank and credit cards. They use Amazon.com's (AMZN - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating) secure hosting platform, and are a partner of CashEdge, the leading financial aggregator used by top banks and mutual fund companies.

The service is free. As the site gains momentum, Geezeo expects to be paid a referral fee by financial services providers that are part of a "matching service" linking users to products they need. Those products must either save the user money by offering lower rates on credit cards or other loans, or help the community member make money, such as a high-yielding savings account. They're in the process of developing a members rating service for those products.

All you have to do to get started is go to the Web site and set up an account, select the bank and credit card accounts you want to track and then submit your mobile phone number. The process takes just minutes. The only hitch I found is that in order to work with the site, you need a browser such as Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox, which are easily downloaded. (Just go to www.mozilla.com for a free download of Firefox.)

Getting Geezeo Organized

In recent weeks, Geezeo.com has added "tagging" functionality to help users figure out where their money went. Since nobody writes checks anymore, the younger generation has been dubbed "Gen P" -- for plastic! And everyone knows that money simply "disappears" when you use a debit card!

Geezeo now "tags" every transaction that comes through your bank account or debit card or credit card -- putting it into a category and, thus, making it simple to track spending. Users can even create their own tags. Then a click of your mouse creates a graphic -- a bar chart that shows clearly where all your money went!

The "social" aspect of this Web site adds a new dimension to these Geezeo Tags. You will soon be able to compare the percentages of what you spend on different categories with the averages for those in your age and income group.

In effect, Geezeo has taken personal finances to the next level -- the "fingertip" level. No longer are you bound by software that resides on your home or office computer. You can access Geezeo.com from any computer, anywhere. And, when you're not near a computer, information will arrive securely on your cell phone in the form of a text message.

Now, you can't hide from your money. And that's The Savage Truth.