Secure, simple and inexpensive personal-computer or cell phone access to all an investor's financial data is the promise that was being offered by companies taking part in Finovate 2007, a financial-technology trade show held in New York last week.
While the majority of the products and services presented were designed for consumers and aimed at banks, many companies are planning to add investment-related capabilities.
At the very least, advisers should be aware of four products that their more tech-advanced clients could soon be using:
If you took Intuit's popular Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax programs, simplified them and bundled them together as a web-based service, you would have Digital Insight's Personal FinanceWorks and Small Business FinanceWorks.
“We've created a solution that can be adopted and branded by the 2,000 smaller, midtier banks and credit unions out there to compete with the banking giants,” said Paul Rosenfeld, vice president and general manager of the small-business division of Digital Insight, a subsidiary of Intuit Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.
The simplicity of the company's new tools, and their being offered as a free or low-cost service by the user's bank, are intended to interest less tech-savvy clients or those too busy to be interested in stand-alone software.
Mr. Rosenfeld said that while brokerage data aren't currently part of the product, adding access to investment records is on the drawing board. Once that feature is in place, brokerage, banking and credit information will be easily and cheaply shared among clients and advisers through an individual's bank or credit union.
In addition to targeting individuals, Intuit is hoping to reach the 22 million businesses in the United States that fall into what it calls the “small and simple” segment. This group, which also would appeal to financial advisers, was uncovered during a quantitative study conducted by the company in January 2006 of more than 5,100 small businesses that had from one to 10 employees.
“We found that one in four households [are] also home to a small business and that most of these are run off a personal checking account,” Mr. Rosenfeld said.
Because the software teases out business-related expenses for tax purposes, Intuit's service will give banks the ability to identify “small and simple” businesses among their customers, which will permit the cross-selling of business-oriented services.
YODLEE SOFTWARE
Gunning to replace Quicken and Microsoft Money in the personal-finance space is Yodlee MoneyCenter.
Redwood City, Calif.-based Yodlee Inc., probably best known to advisers as an account aggregator for such institutions as Ameriprise Financial Inc. of Minneapolis, Boston-based
Fidelity Investments and Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. of New York, is now in the business of serving the individual investor, as well.
“We're getting two new users a second, 180 logins per minute, and we've got a total of 3 million users. Everything is interconnected and fully available via mobile devices,” said Peter Hazlehurst, senior vice president of product development.
In addition to being able to access their bank accounts, loans and credit cards, MoneyCenter users can access their brokerage account data and easily get a sense of whether their total financial portfolio is growing.
A company spokeswoman said that MoneyCenter's interconnectedness will soon present real opportunities for advisers, especially independent advisers who often struggle with reconciling disparate data streams for individual clients.
She declined to discuss specifics.
MINT SOFTWARE
Aaron Patzer, the 26-year-old chief executive and founder of Mint Software Inc., of Mountain View, created his company in 2005 when he realized it would take more than a day to catch up on reconciling his personal bookkeeping and his personal financial information.
Mint is a money management service for individuals. Signing up for the service takes less than five minutes and requires just the user names and passwords for the online portals of a user's various financial institutions.
There is no need for manual data entry of account numbers, and the company's security has been audited and verified by VeriSign Inc. of Mountain View and TRUSTe of San Francisco. After signing up for an account, all personal identifiers are purged from Mint's systems, preventing them from correlating a user and their data.
Mint has more than 14 million merchants in its database and uses Yodlee's account aggregation service to connect with more than 3,500 financial institutions.
It hopes to make money and remain free to users through sponsored advertising. Mint's proprietary search algorithms scan through thousands of offers from financial providers; if a user signs up for one of these services, Mint is paid a small fee by the advertiser.
Mr. Patzer said the service plans to add brokerage account data by the end of the first quarter of 2008.
An online “personal-social-finance application,” Geezeo Inc. of Framingham, Mass.,
(InvestmentNews, Sept. 10) used the Finovate conference — sponsored by Chesterfield, Mo., software and consulting firm Amdocs Ltd. — to announce the addition of automated account aggregation from more than 3,000 brokerage, mutual fund and insurance companies.
“Automated access to brokerage accounts has been our most requested feature from Day One,” said Geezeo co-founder Shawn Ward.
The company's site, which became publicly available in May, was the first financial-social-networking site to offer free online account aggregation for all of an investor's financial accounts.
Davis D. Janowski can be reached at [email protected].
