Financial sites give clients access to data

Tech Bits appears on the web and in IN Daily every Friday. Comments are welcome at IN Editor@InvestmentNews. Advisers, behold — or beware! The Motley Fool and mint.com have announced a partnership in which they will share articles and other educational content and link to each other’s sites. A co-branded www.fool.mint.com website is up and available now with additional content to be added over the coming months. I first told you about the nifty online consumer expense-tracking and account aggregation tool mint.com back in October. Since then, the site has built up a user base of more than 200,000. The new combined site allows users to access mint.com, which permits viewing and categorizing transaction data from a user’s accounts at banks, credit card companies and investment firms for free. Aaron Patzer, chief executive and founder of mint.com, believes that greater access by consumers to all their financial data will be a plus for advisers. “The end result of the partnership is many more people who are saving … and then investing wisely,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Of course, investing is complicated and intimidating — even with great content as guidance. I suspect, therefore, that with more people having money to invest, things can only get better for financial advisers.” For more information, visit www.fool.mint.com. Tickermine, in case you hadn’t heard If any of your clients have ever expressed a desire to be inundated with data about sales or buying patterns, www.Tickermine.com may be the answer. The site offers real-time, channel and point-of-sale market data, and could end up being a new stop on the Internet for your clients — or you. Representatives of the site say there has been a 50% increase in page views in March over February and a 250% increase over December. At press time, Tickermine had not responded to a request for the actual numbers. The site uses a proprietary electronic methodology to crawl the web to identify trends, consumer preferences and buying patterns in broad retail, technology and energy categories based on point-of-sale data. There’s a free version of the service that provides select, time-delayed original content, one that provides all original content on a real-time basis along with data that is displayed on Tickermine only ($100 per month or $1,100 for a 12-month subscription). A third, more expensive version provides everything from the second option, but data is available in raw format that can be imported into Excel. For more information, visit www.tickermine.com. Davis D. Janowski is the technology reporter for InvestmentNews.