In my search for next-generation financial services, I stumbled upon a website called Wesabe. It purports itself to be a service for anyone who facing monetary problems (and who isn't, these days?). Users can post questions and advice to each other. It seems like a pretty supportive community and is fairly casual. I haven't seen anything like this before; this sort of thing usually comes in the form of self-help books or static how-to websites without much interaction. I think this can really go places.
Now, the social networking aspect of the site is something that I find particularly interesting, probably because it's such an integral part of a young person's life, but that neglects the other tools that the service provides. Wesabe enables users to see all of their financial data in one centralized location, much like Mint.com, a service that I've frequented for more than half a year now.
Both sites actually share quite a few similarities. They allow you to categorize transactions posted from your various bank accounts using different tags (something common to blog services and site aggregators) as well as set spending targets. They can be automatically set based on aggregations and averages of your spending patterns over time or manually.
This does bring about a number of issues, however. Probably the most prominent is security. How is a site like Mint or Wesabe supposed to guarantee peace of mind for users who are centralizing all of their bank information in one spot? What do you think about this reasoning? Is this enough peace of mind for you?
Now, the social networking aspect of the site is something that I find particularly interesting, probably because it's such an integral part of a young person's life, but that neglects the other tools that the service provides. Wesabe enables users to see all of their financial data in one centralized location, much like Mint.com, a service that I've frequented for more than half a year now.
Both sites actually share quite a few similarities. They allow you to categorize transactions posted from your various bank accounts using different tags (something common to blog services and site aggregators) as well as set spending targets. They can be automatically set based on aggregations and averages of your spending patterns over time or manually.
This does bring about a number of issues, however. Probably the most prominent is security. How is a site like Mint or Wesabe supposed to guarantee peace of mind for users who are centralizing all of their bank information in one spot? What do you think about this reasoning? Is this enough peace of mind for you?
4 comments:
Hi Alex, Chelsea from Quicken PR here. You bring up some great questions about financial security. Intuit, makers of Quicken, offers a free Web-based personal finance software: www.quickenonline.com. Security of customer data has been our main concern for 20 years. We've continued this tradition with Quicken Online. Here is a little more on security but contact me directly if you want to talk in-depth about it: http://help.quicken.com/support/privacy/security.shtml
I think that if we trust online-banking and find it to be secure we should really have no problem trusting one of the sites you mentioned. Using the same reference I made in class...we probably get multiple bank statements in our mailboxes...why not have multiple bank statements on one website. I think a website is hard to hack than a mailbox is to open.
Despite the obvious benefits that come with the services provided by this business, I believe information security is very crucial. Even if it may extremely hard to hack into a websites system, there will always be someone who can and will attempt to do so. I believe in order for the business to be very strategic, huge investments need to pumped into companies that specialize in information protection in order to prevent lawsuits and allegations of that nature, just in case someones account details is hacked.
It is interesting how everyone looking for next generation financial services stumbles on articles and information about social networking-type websites. I can't help but draw a comparison between what Alex is describing and my article on MeettheBoss.com. Although on different scales, both websites need to place huge emphasis on security - Alex's examples to protect customer's financial data, and MeettheBoss.com to protect any shared documents that could potentially provide insider information. All this focus on security also brings my attention to something else - it has been quite a long time since I've heard of major computer virus outbreaks, hacker attacks or any other news on malicious softwares and intrusion attempts. It's not that they are all gone, but we have to admit that the options we have of protecting our digital world have grown tremendously since the first days of the web. Maybe this is why websites and people are starting to become more trusting and open to storing and disclosing, respectively, important private information.
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