The Bankwatch

 Congrats Paul and Finextra on going live with embedding community into their site, with their professional network.  It has been in beta for 6 months, and just went live.

I have been posting over there periodically, and posted this today.  In general, I think it will tend to be future oriented things I do on Finextra, but still working that out.

‘Build your own Bank’ to become customer centric?

They are financial and social; two characteristics that were never expected to be operating together, but that genie has now left the bottle. Both Wesabe, and Prosper have shown there is a way to use personal data, combined with strong security, and preferences management, to provide advisory and transactional assistance at a level and scale that one bank can never achieve, one employee at a time.

Aite Group issue a new report that assesses the business and technology strategy amongst 21 large US banks. So this will I presume include, Wells, Citi, Wachovia, Chase etc.

“Online Banking: Moving Toward a New Paradigm Aite Group forecasts that by 2010, 13% of checking accounts will be opened online in the United States, up from 3% in 2006. Aite Group recommends the leading online banking channel vendors should progress beyond software applications and offer value-added services, such as online marketing outsourcing, to remain competitive.”

Source: “Aite Group, LLC Report #200608281 - Mozilla Firefox”

The report details the banks’ interest in eight value-added products and services including expedited bill payment, account-to-account transfers, fraud management services, online personal finance management tools (PFM-Lite), card-based bill payments, online bill presentment, account aggregation, and online marketing campaign outsourcing.

Among its key findings, the report notes that while banks are making online customer acquisitions a priority, there are significant differences in the number of new, online accounts banks are opening. The top performer, among the banks surveyed, is sourcing about 20% of its new checking accounts online, the next highest performer is sourcing 13%, and the lowest performer is sourcing 0.03%.

The vendors mentioned in the report is a useful list of vendors in this space.

The vendors mentioned in the report include:

Andera, BankDetect, Cashedge, CheckFree, Corillian/Intelidata, Digital Insight, eFunds, Equifax, Experian, Financial Fusion, Intuit, Lexis-Nexis, MasterCard RPPS, Metavante, Microsoft, MoneyGram, Online Resources/Princeton eCom, Verid, Visa ePay, Western Union, Xoom, and Yodlee.

Yodlee continue to successfully build out functionality, and capability founded on aggregation of all a consumers financial accounts.

Finextra: Yodlee launches personal finance platform

The Yodlee MoneyCenter suite includes Yodlee PersonalFinance, Yodlee BillPay, and Yodlee FundsTransfer. The integrated solution gives consumers everything they need to answer the ever-important and ever-changing question: where is my money?

Key Yodlee MoneyCenter Features:

• Account Consolidation - from over 8,000 financial, bill and rewards accounts
• Personal Data Reports - such as a net worth statement, cash flow report, and historical  account balances
• Expense Categorization - for all credit card and bank account transactions
• Budgeting - including spending analysis, goal vs. actual and business related  reports and  charts
• Automatic Check Register - includes future, projected cash flows based on  scheduled  payments and transactions
• Bill Pay - including card payments and “same day” payment credit for consumers
• Account-to-Account Funds Transfers - the easiest, quickest way to move money  between any  two financial accounts
• Universal Portfolio Tracker - with quotes, company profiles, and historical portfolio  performance and asset allocation charts

Technorati Tags: aggregation, online+banking

Despite the positive comments here, I believe account aggregation as a stand-alone concept is dead. Customers didn't get it, saw no incremental value, and in fact were scared of it, because of having to share online sign in credentials.

However, and perhaps thats where Robert is going with his post, it will be a valid component in development of other services in the future, and it will be bank changing in its significance.

WebCPA | Tools and Resources for the Electronic Accountant - An Investcorp and SourceMedia Publication

Since a search of the Intuit Web site yields no hits for the term, "Customer Central," it's likely this technology will surface in the next year or so. But maybe it's not aggregation. TekPortal also supported online account opening and authentication services, the same things that get more attention these days at Yodlee.

We noted recently the new Yodlee service, which eliminates the "friction" that binds customers to banks today. This is a brilliant strategy, that uses aggregation to add value.

The other space I see aggregation playing, and I can see Intuit going there, is financial planning. Once you have all your customer data in one place, it can be sorted, manipulated, and analysed. The power in that concept is considerable, to develop investment plans, track success, alert for issues, and help the customer stay on track. Even more powerful if the data is shared with the customers personal broker/ banker/ financial planner, then the customer can watch the planner at work and see the results real time.

Relevance to Bankwatch:
Real and valid new services can be developed using aggregation as a component tool.

Technorati Tags: account_aggregation