Personal Financial Management Systems

I have chosen to look at personal finance applications and their future as centralized tools for consumers. As we found in class, it is now expected that consumer-banking products come with an array of online tools that give customers 24/7 access to their account information such as balances, and maybe even bill-pay abilities. While these are welcome advances to today’s mobile-minded consumers, some of us want more from these services. Where are the centralized portals where I can view all of my account information for various financial instruments? What about budgeting tools along with bill pay? The Internet is full of dynamically generated content and there are already forecasting and prediction tools out there, why not incorporate this into my finances?  

There are several financial management sites that have begun addressing the absence of these features from the websites of our financial institutions. In general, they offer increasing compatibility with various institutions and unique tools to track, monitor, and forecast based on a user’s mix of bank accounts, loans and mortgages, and investments. According to the article from American Banker, these companies are each finding their own individual niches to appeal to with a different set of features.

Intuit has just removed the subscription cost for its service and has recently added spending management features designed for low-income consumers. Mint is attempting to appeal to consumers with more “sophisticated banking needs” by adding investment tracking and retirement account access to their existing services. Geezeo is expanding from its college student focus by creating community tools revolving around financial habits. 

As each targets a different demographic, all of these online financial management sites share one crucial attribute: each of them offers their solutions for no cost to the user. Intuit, the highly recognized name in the personal finance market, was relatively unsuccessful in porting their Quicken software to the Internet in terms of obtaining a viable customer base at first. A spokesman for the company is cited in the article as saying, “We dropped the ball with Quicken Online… [the monthly fee] was an obstacle for people to enter.” They’ve reevaluated their target customer and acknowledged that the most likely users of the online software are not the same as those using the original Quicken. To compete with this, Mint and other companies make money by recommending financial products to users and getting referral fees from banks.

The playing field is level and the management sites are left creating features to segment and position themselves for the future. As personal finance tools, compatibility with a broader range of banks and lenders, and consumer trust for security measures of such products go up, the sites may find that banks seek their services as part of their own online packages in the future. 

Daniel Wolfe. "Financial Web Site Operators Increasing Focus on Niches. " American Banker  [New York, N.Y.] 20  Oct. 2008,8. Accounting & Tax Periodicals. ProQuest.  American University. 2 Nov. 2008