Funny how these things work. Just yesterday I was with a group of Wisconsin credit unions discussing when personal financial management (PFM) tools like FinanceWorks (basically a Quicken plugin for online banking) and Amplify’s excellent Money Tracker would be more integrated into online banking applications. Today, I spotted this announcement that Delta Community Credit Union in Georgia would integrate Wesabe’s PFM into their site.
It’s the first partnership I’ve seen between Wesabe and a financial institution. They announced their Wesabe Springboard application for partnering with financial institutions back in March.
One of the challenges, which this partnership seems aimed to solve, is that Wesabe never sought ad dollars, meaning there was no obvious revenue stream. That’s where partnering with a member-friendly financial institution comes into play. Credit unions that put members’ financial well-being first will see PFM tools as an obvious next step. In five years, some iteration of them will be standard. Within ten, they will be essential.
Skeptics chime in: “PFM won’t be widespread. Not that many people use Quicken now.” The latter is true; the former won’t be, because tools like Quicken have been so time-intensive for users until now. But the new software at places like Wesabe, MoneyTracker, Mint, Thrive, SimpliFi and others remove the onerous data entry and increasingly offer useful layman’s advice.
On a competitive front, NOT offering these tools means that some members are likely to use them on competing sites, where advertisers can lure them away with product offerings.
To date, I’ve only seen built-in PFM tools at Amplify FCU, South Carolina FCU, and now Delta Community. Is anybody else out there feeling this tremor?
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Hi Ben- Great post on a key issue for CU’s to be looking at. Since you mentioned SimpliFi, I thought I should point out that BrightLeaf Financial (a CUSO) has the exclusive rights to distribute the SimpliFi platform as a white-label solution to CU’s. BrightLeaf currently has a dozen CU’s and is working to get more. Let me know if you want to chat further about our experience selling a planning-based tool to CU’s!
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At Mountain America we use FinanceWorks as a “plugin” with our internet banking. We have been live for 4 months – here is a brief profile of the active users: 74% of active users are 40 or younger; 45% of active users are Gen Y (18-30); 5% of active online banking users are enrolled in FinanceWorks without a major marketing effort. I see this as a pretty important tool reaching a defined market. Other thoughts?
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@Bryan – Thanks for the info. Is SimpliFi operational at the 12 credit unions, or pending?
@Todd – Thanks for the hard data and for listing another progressive credit union that’s in the game. It’s always nice to register a hunch as confirmed :)
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@Ben – Live at 8 of 12, with the remaining to come online by end of Q2. About 30k users across the CU’s so far, with a good bit of throttling from a marketing perspective. I’ve got full user stats that I’d be happy to share if you’re interested! Take care—Bryan
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Thanks for the insights. We have registered and are very very satisfied.
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