Managing personal finances probably isn’t on the top-ten list of weekend activities for most consumers. But free personal finance manager (PFM) sites like Mint and LearnVest make it easier–and try to make it fun.
For those unfamiliar, PFM sites are marketed as “dashboards,” and feature easily readable graphs that show where the users’ money goes. They catalog purchases from rent or mortgage to a bar tab, so that users can create monthly budgets and flag tax-deductible expenses. Mint provides money-saving alerts and free advice like: “You got hit with a finance charge!” or “We’ve found the best credit cards for you.” While LearnVest, which targets women especially, offers free online “boot camp” classes. The list goes on.
While consumers like seeing all their finances in one friendly place, they don’t like the fact that they can’t do anything about it there–namely pay those bills or move money between accounts–using the same site or app. That capability is gradually coming, with the help of new finance technology, business models and willing, often smaller, banks.
What’s been the holdup so far?
Traditionally, big banks have been reluctant to hand over control of any kind to other sites or service providers when it comes to technology that’s customer-facing. A financial services strategist with consumer-research firm Iconoculture, Greg Archibald, explained: “[Banks] want to keep as much of that [customer] relationship as they can. They want you to open more accounts and use their products.”
To keep customers close, banks have been building in-house PFMs, which have their own shortcomings. In most cases, consumers can do whatever they want with their money, as long as it’s in that bank. Take PNC Bank’s Virtual Wallet. It has a slick, user-friendly design, but Virtual Wallet doesn’t allow customers, for example, to see the balance and transactions on a credit card from any other bank.
