Online Personal Finance Heats Up: Part 1

By Jim Bruene on September 5, 2007 3:26 PM

The race to become the next Quicken of online finance is heating up this fall with several launches expected before year-end (note 1). At our upcoming new products conference, FINOVATE 2007, you will be treated to live demos of five leading personal finance apps. Three are newcomers: Geezeo, Jwaala, Mint, and two are industry veterans launching new online versions, Digital Insight (Intuit) and Yodlee. Here are brief profiles of two newcomers. We'll look at the other three in part two on Friday.

Jwaala
Jwaala, out of Austin, Tex., made a splash in March when it debuted on Amplify Credit Union's site, winning our OBR Best of the Web award in the process (see post here). The specific feature to win recognition (see note 1) was the personalized RSS feeds available to MoneyTracker users. The natural language search is also a significant improvement over typical expense manager search functions.

Jwaala, which was a finalist in the TechCrunch 20 start-up conference, has also built a simple Google-like, text-based ad server into its MoneyTracker interface. It allows CU and bank marketers to run relevant marketing and educational messages next to transaction data and query results (see screenshot #1 below). Amplify CU, which is an investor in Jwaala, has given the service considerable marketing play with several links on its homepage (see screenshot below) and a series of instructional/marketing videos accessible from the MoneyTracker landing page (here).

Mint
Mountain View, Calif.-based Mint is still in limited private beta, so we can't say much about its online personal finance manager. However, the company says this about itself:

Mint is building a free, simple, and secure personal finance web-app. Designed to be effortless, Mint consolidates your financial life in one place. Easily see how much you have, how much you owe, and where your money goes. Advanced alerts notify you before you bounce a check or forget to pay a bill. Patent pending algorithms even show you personalized ways to save and make more money. If your finances could use organization without effort, Mint is for you.

After putting our name on its mailing list several months ago, we finally received an invitation to its private beta Saturday. I am about to sign up, but since I will be sworn to secrecy, I wanted to finish this post first, so that I wouldn't have to worry about accidentally revealing a feature. As we mentioned in our previous post (here), you can learn quite a bit about the product and the company's outlook by reading the active Mint blog (see screenshot #3 below) which has published 102 articles in its 6-month history, an amazing amount of content for a company that hasn't yet launched its product.

Notes:
1. For more information, consult two recent reports from Online Banking Report: Online Personal Finance and Social Personal Finance.

2. OBR Best of the Web awards are given out occasionally for features that raise the bar in online financial services. It is NOT necessarily an endorsement of the company or its full product.

Exhibits

Screenshot 1: Jwaala interface showing personalized "marketing bar" (4 Sept 2007)

Screenshot 2: Amplify CU homepage with links to Money Tracker (5 Sep 2007)

Note: Amplify makes great use of video to sell the benefits. Check out the video tour of its "cafe style" branch (on the Amplify homepage here, click on the "play video" button to the right of the branch photo).

Screenshot #3: Mint blog main page (5 Sept 2007)