I’m blogging live from Finovate today. Here’s an update from the third demo session:
- Mint – Releasing Financial Fitness… get a financial score based on how close you adhere to 5 personal finance principles over the last month: 1) Know your money 2) Spend less than earn 3) Use credit and debt wisely 4) Investing what you save 5) Prepared for the unexpected… Mint said this makes it “game-like”, which is something that I’ve told MoneyStrands they needed almost a year ago. I wrote this in the past (Feeling Poor: Here Are The Two Largest Reasons Why)
- Pertuity Direct – A little like P2P, but bundles similar loans into groups similar to mutual funds.
- SecondMarket – Facilitates trades of illiquid assets. It seems very much like Ebay for financial products of the rich of and famous. Like Ebay: it doesn’t take inventory.
- Acculynk – PIN debit transactions for online shopping. Security for shopping. Jumbles PIN as you enter them online. I get bored by security presentations.
- Aradiom – Security software for mobile phone applications. This is necessary, but it’s not exciting unless you are creating a financial application for a cell phone. They got deductions from me for mentioning all other phones except for the Palm Pre.
- LowerMyAssessment.com – Helps homeowners save on money on property taxes. Seems like Zillow, but they say is better (i.e. “financial-grade”). In less than two minutes they said they can save me money since my assed value is 35,893.00 more than my FairMarket Value
- MoBank – Make iPhone or iTouch payments. I think I heard a month ago that Apple is entering this space. Seems cool, but I want to make sure it works with all phones and all merchants. Otherwise it’s a non-starter for me.
- ZimpleMoney – Online financial agreements: loans, leases, rent, billing, etc. It’s delivered as software as a service. Overall it’s pretty cool, I like it.
- Jwaala – I liked them a lot last year, and still like them this year… They are a lot like Strands, Mint, Wesabe, etc… but they partner with banks. If your bank doesn’t participate
I like Mint’s Financial Fitness if you couldn’t tell – I can’t wait to check it out and see how much I fail. ZimpleMoney is also pretty cool, but it’s a step behind in my voting.
The three I was most familiar with going in are Mint, Pertuity Direct and ZimpleMoney. We were able to interview the CEO of Pertuity Direct and ZimpleMoney over the past few weeks.
Can you please PLEASE get the guys from MINT to create a real, a legitimate, and a working budget tool? What they call a “budget tool” now is atrocious, doesn’t work, and uses really poor math. It readjusts your “budget” based on how much you spend so your “target” is your average expenditure amount. How does this make sense?
Without this feature, it’s merely pretending to be a financial tool.