financial institutions Archives - Lazy Man and Money

Live from Finovate Startup – First Demo Session

April 28, 2009 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

I’m blogging live from Finovate today. Here’s an update from the first demo session:

Expensify – “Expense reports that don’t suck…” Gets all information from a credit card import and can produce an IRS tax-compatible receipt. Import from 92% of the US credit cards… Fairly impressive reporting.
kaChing – KaChing follows fund managers and reports extremely detailed information. The CNBC crowd should love this.
CircleUp – Their SmartPay product solves a very common problem, collecting information from groups of people. Sounds like it only uses Amazon payments (no Paypal?). They pushed integration with AOL Web Mail – not really that interesting in my opinion.
The Receivables Exchange – I’m a little hazy on this one… it’s not in my wheelhouse (i.e. not personal finance related). Allows companies to sell receivables, in a P2P marketplace. You bid on invoices that you like and collect the money. The company gets their money early to bring in more business… at least I think that’s how it works.
Strands – Competitor to Mint and Wesabe… The widget-based interface looks impressive… Good analysis of your income/expenses… Financial alerts could be useful… They integrate a news reader where you can add some blogs… You probably don’t care since they don’t offer Lazy Man and Money despite the fact that I helped them in a focus group. (I’m not bitter, not a small bit…)
iThryv – Pretty cool banking platform for financial institutions. They are big on the customizable UI (as you’d guess), but also allow good customization of the widgets. Also can target customers based on demographics… a 23-year old woman may get a different interface than a 60-year old man. They built in some reward point system in. It was more impressive than it sounds, but I don’t think you’ll find value in them unless your bank partners with them.
Lending Club – They talked a lot about the secondary marketplace… we already knew that, so it wasn’t that interesting. They previewed an upcoming feature. They previewed a feature to compare your performance to other lenders.
Tempo Payments – Tempo claims to offer higher reward debit cards. You can customize your card. Can you say Hello Kitty awesomeness?!?! They claim to offer an 80-90% approval rate. I will look into this a little more, but I wonder if the rewards will compete with my credit card rewards.
Wesabe – Cool, you can group together two credit cards. Wesabe has started selling Springboard – a whitelabeled version of Wesabe. They’ve signed Georgia’s largest credit union.

That’s it for the first round… I think I like Strands and CircleUp as the most useful new personal finance apps (Wesabe and Lending Club were already in my favorites. Expensify could be great for the business person on the go. Everyone seemed to love iThryv, but it means nothing to me without banking partners.

As Blog Traffic Exchange mentioned via Twitter, the buzzword here seems to be “widgets.” I don’t mind because I love me some widgets.

SmartyPig: Gift Card Redeemed

June 14, 2008 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

Last week, I finally got around to starting up my SmartyPig account again. You may recall that I had trouble when I tried in the past. However, the questions their verification partner asked me about my financial accounts did not match what I knew to be true of my financial accounts. SmartyPig promptly mailed the documents necessary for me to be manually verified and once I got around to filling it out, set me up right away. I’d have to give them an A+ for customer service, but then I might not be the typical customer as they asked me to try out their service.

So with my gift card in hand and an activated SmartyPig account, it was time to see if I can deposit this gift card. The first thing I did when I logged in was go to the tab that said, Redeem a Gift Card (makes sense, right?). When I got there, the page said that I had to add a bank account first. My heart sank, thinking that this was going to take 3-4 days while SmartyPig deposits a few cents in my account and I verify that later (something that I’ve done with a couple of financial institutions in just the last week). I was pleasantly surprised that this was not necessary – I was able to set up my bank account right away.

Setting up the bank account was fairly easy, but it took me two tries. One of the pieces of bank information that SmartyPig asks is the bank’s phone number. I had expected to only need my checkbook for bank routing numbers and account numbers. For the phone number, I had to retrieve my wallet. Though I’m Lazy, I’m not that Lazy, so this didn’t upset me much. I pulled out my bank card to look on the back and entered in the number in the format of 1800xxxxxxx as I didn’t see SmartyPig request a specific format. I then put the card and wallet away and focused on the routing numbers. When I had finished entering those, I submitted the form. Turns out that I didn’t enter the phone number in the xxx-xxx-xxxx format. So I had to get out my card again and re-enter the number. But I also had to re-enter my bank account’s information again since the form didn’t say that. A suggestion to SmartyPig: either be very clear about the format of the phone number you want or accept pretty much any form that a person could put in.

So now that I had my bank account set-up it was finally time to enter in my gift card. I go to the Redeem a Gift Card tab and enter in my gift card serial number and pin. I get ready to click submit, but I realize there’s no submit button, just one that says Decline This Card. That scares me quite a bit, I fear if I click that it will void the card and all my work will be for nothing. I do notice some text after the pin that says I haven’t set up a savings goal yet, so I couldn’t redeem the gift card yet. I don’t know why it asked me for the serial number rather than just tell me to set up a savings goal. Once I set up a savings goal, I could easily redeem the card.

I set up my goal to be $250, which I estimate is how it’s going to cost me for an upgraded Asus Eee after I sell my old Asus Eee. With the gift card I’m 20% of the way there. I’m happy that my account will be earning a decent interest rate of 3.90%.

Overall, I think SmartyPig has a great idea, but a few minor things need to be ironed out. Once they clear up the minor usability issues, my only question is about the idea of the gift card. If you know someone has a SmartyPig account the gift card is a fantastic gift idea. If the person does not have a SmartyPig account set up, I think there are too many hoops to jump through (the issues I had in signing up, setting up and linking a new bank account, giving up your social security number to another place, having to create a specific savings goal). I would only get someone a SmartyPig gift card after I exhausted the options of cash, checks, savings bonds, Amazon gift card, or an Ebay gift card.

Finovate Demos – Part 3

June 14, 2008 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

Here’s another round of my notes from yesterday’s Finovate demos. Since each company only got 5 minutes to show their stuff, my notes are short as well. I got to meet many of the companies afterward to get more detail.

Expensr – I thought this might steal Best of Show. It’s a personal finance management tool like Mint, but with a strong focus on widgets. The idea is that you can customize everything to your liking, which is one of the things that came up a month ago at a blogger meet-up they sponsored. They also have been acquired and will change their name to MoneyStrands. Shawn and Reman also put on a witty presentation ending with a humorous revelation that Mint must be scared of them because they bought an ad on Google for expensr.

SmartyPig – I’ve mentioned them in the past and hope to have a more complete review of their product in a week. They focus on three things as far as I can tell: making savings goals public so others can contribute, savings from their partnered retails, an interest bearing account earning a good rate.

Invesra – Retirement planning for financial institutions such as banks and credit unions. Not affiliated with a fund family which makes them unbiased. I believe they sell their product directly to the banks, so if your bank doesn’t buy it, you can’t use it.

Typhone – Mobile contactless payments with a great emphasis on security using industry jargon that I didn’t really understand. I don’t think I care about mobile payments much.

Wesabe – Wesabe had one of the most interesting demos in my opinion. So good that I went back after to see it again (and offer advice for how they can improve the product). They rolled out a new way to compare merchants and find better buying options. It’s much better than what they launched with originally. I could actually see myself using this, which may be the biggest praise I can give.

Wonga – This was one of the oddest entries of the show. It’s a UK-based company, with the URL of Samedaycash.co.uk. You can borrow money for the short term and pay them back at about a percent a day. Want to borrow money for 30 days, you’ll have to pay back 30% (though the interest rate wasn’t mentioned). Ramit and I turned to each other and said, “payday loan.” He made a good point that a credit card is a better deal if you have to pay it off within 30 days (as is the case here). You could pay no interest with the credit card.

Loanio – The much anticipated P2P lending company did show and demo the product. It looks like an unpolished Prosper.com. I have been waiting to hear what make them different than Prosper. It seems there are two things. You can have a co-borrower/co-signer on your loan and you can pay an additional fee to have a platinum listing (I’m not 100% sure what that got you).

Confident Technologies – Tries to the Internet of passwords. They partner with financial institutions to create a new way for customers to log into their accounts. Customers choose two categories like bikini babes and money. When you login, you type your username and up pops 16 pictures of various things like fish, hats, dogs, etc. Two of those 16 pictures will be a bikini babe and a picture of money. You select that pair and it knows it’s you. Bikini babe and money photo is different every time. Lots of scientific psychology studies back this up as a good thing for users. Not sure if bikini babes is one of the available categories – I would imagine it’s not.

IP Commerce – From my notes, “No idea what they do… energetic presenter.” I talked with a few people afterward and only one person had an idea of what they did, because it’s highly relevant to their day job.

SimpleTuition – Approximately from my home town in Massachusetts, they help students find loans and easily apply for them. It’s that “Simple” and useful.