This year’s flagship Finovate event was held on October 14th at the Crowne Plaza Times Square in New York and, judging by the reactions from both presenters and delegates, was a raging success!
On paper, the schedule looked demanding, with 24 companies having just seven minutes each to make an impression using a live demo of their proposition; powerpoint was banned! Add into the mix two hour-long networking opportunities, plus lunch & coffee breaks, and the event started to look time-poor to say the least. In practice however, the format worked brilliantly, and Finovate was an absolute pleasure to attend.
Sure, improvements could be made; man-in-the-hot-seat Eric Mattson (CEO, Online Financial Innovations) already has plans for a 5-minute Q&A session led by an expert panel after each presentation at the next event, and also noted the impromptu Twitter back-channel that operated throughout the day (although neither of us had a clue what to do about it!) I guess that the informal eve-of-Finovate gathering in a local hostillery might also become a regular feature, although having emailed Eric to suggest such an event, I was particularly disappointed to have missed the inaugural one thanks to an hour-and-a-half queue to clear Immigration at JFK! Homeland Security: I don’t need a poster to tell me your gun-toting guards are the “face of your country”, I need you to have more than just 12 of those faces processing two plane-loads of visitors when our bodyclocks are telling us we should be in bed already. Also disappointing was Crowne Plaza’s decision to close the hotel bar for the duration of the conference. Given the turmoil in the financial markets that was going on outside of our little Manhattan bubble, a good stiff lunchtime drink would’ve been more than welcome for us finance types. Time for the reviews…
The New Quicken Online (Todd Stanley)
A great opening session from Todd Stanley – plenty of energy, humour, and a very polished presentation. Todd grabbed his audience’s attention with the candid disclosure that, in the past, Quicken has been “slow to respond” to customer feedback, and that it was “kinda my Dad’s product”. Quicken’s research has shown that their product needs a complete change of focus, particularly as “70% of Americans now live from paycheck to paycheck, up from 40% just three years ago”, and that there is a real demand for “an anytime, anywhere solution”.
In responding to these challenges, Quicken has focussed on “customer driven innovation”. The result is a “clean simple UI; less is more”, because “desktop software is too intimidating”. Watch that word intimidating; it’s going to crop up again and again at Finovate, almost as much as “vertical”!
I really like Quicken’s change of focus; this feels like an app I could use. The alerting on account balances and risk of overdraft are well executed and go a long way to solving the biggest problem Quicken’s researchers found that users had with their finances today: “managing cash in a checking account between now and the next payday.” Funnily enough, Matt & I had identified this same problem during a brainstorming session a month or so ago! This focus on immediate finance is at “the heart of the new Quicken”. There is a spending money “outlook” view, plus the ability to filter views by the time between paycheck cycles. Finally, Quicken is introducing a mobile component which allows users to instruct Quicken to “send me a daily status”
Quicken Online became a free service the day before Finovate 08, and the new version will launch in the USA on October 30th. Whether the rest of the world will ever see it (yes, Quicken, there are people who live outside of North America) will largely depend on whether Quicken’s worldwide affiliates decide to pull their fingers out (so that’ll be a no, then).
Fincision rating: 7/10 (1 point deducted for ignoring the rest of the world; we’re a global village now, didn’tcha know?)
WeSeed (Steve Simoncic)
WeSeed is for people who have “never invested in the stock market”, “don’t get the language”, and “find it too intimidating” (there’s the “i” word again); its the “stock market for the rest of us”. WeSeed is also “completely safe” as it uses “fake stock; fake money”, but let’s users “get their hands dirty” anyway!
Users are encouraged to start by “investing in what you know”, by choosing from an array of specially created micro-markets, such as fashion, kids, sports and tech. They can also run a proprietary keyword search which returns relevant stocks “Facebook style”, and then construct a virtual brokerage account known as “PortfolioYOU”. There’s a feature which shows the “Companies you own” plus a user’s personal compatibility rating (“similar to match.com” – that’s another phrase that’ll crop up a few times in this post) to particular stocks. Inevitably, there’s also a social element to WeSeed, with users able make connections with investors interested in the same micro-markets, tap into stock views from other users, and “follow Weseeders you think are smart.”
But for me, WeSeed is a bit of a conundrum. It’s a nice looking execution of a fairly unoriginal core idea (think fantasy portfolios done web 2.0), but I can’t get past the feeling that it’s a one-trick pony. Is it just an educational tool/ game with a slightly different take on categorising stock, or can it really help make people better at investing? How do users move from managing virtual to real portfolios, and what is WeSeed’s role once that happens?
The presenter’s referencing of match.com and Facebook didn’t help convince me that WeSeed has enough originality and appeal to survive, particularly when this “stock market for the rest of us” is launching just about the time the rest of us appear to be dumping stock like crazy. Now if WeSeed has a way of educating unsophisticated investors not to sell at the bottom of the market, it might be a lot more relevant in today’s climate…
WeSeed is signing up beta testers right now, if you want to see what it’s all about. Thanks for the t-shirt, guys… … but (sorry) I think it might last longer than you will, although I hope you get the chance to tell me how wrong I was next April in San Francisco!
PS. I REALLY don’t like your homepage, especially with that youtube vid that starts up without my permission; very poor usability, people…
Fincision rating: 6/10
Wesabe (Gabe Griego)
Gabe set himself a mountain to climb by opening up with the assertion that Wesabe was the “perfect blend of community and finance”. Did he peak too soon? LOL Well, at the time of the presentation, I genuinely had a good feeling about Wesabe, but now I’ve come to write about it, I’m starting to think that there wasn’t much substance once you get past the highly polished marketing messages. Sure, being able to fire an expense into Wesabe via twitter is a neat solution to the bain of all personal finance managers – near-time data input – but it isn’t a game-changer in the same way that rival Mint is going about things. In fact, there’s nothing original in the other core ideas Gabe presented either: allowing users to enter their own tags for categories of spending, customising their home pages a la igoogle, or comparing themselves to other “Wesabeans”, and I certainly don’t think that the grand claim to be “taking the API concept to everybody” is borne out by building a shared gallery of user-designed and community-rated graphs!
So, is this all that Wesabe has up its sleeve to “bring community data and personal data to life”? Perhaps not, as Gabe admitted that Wesabe was “not as far along as we’d like this (to be) – still fresh out of the gate.” There were seeds of good but still unoriginal ideas, such as a community-powered merchant rating system, but Wesabe needs to try a lot harder if it wants to live up to its own hype. That hype is a big part of the problem for me. Telling people that “money is one of those things that is hard to talk about” sounded reasonable in the context of Gabe’s presentation, but when you leave the conference hall and find that the whole world appears to be talking about nothing else, you start to see through the marketing messages to a fairly uninspiring set of product enhancements.
Fincision rating: 5/10
ZoneAlarm Forcefield (John Gable)
My initial reaction to seeing this session appear on the agenda was to wonder why it was allowed in, so I was pleasantly surprised by John’s presentation. His opening pitch, that “cyber criminals are making more money out of online than drugs” by “hooking into the web browser” was pretty compelling, and his observation that most phishing software “relies on a list” was a bit scary!
His product, Forcefield, wraps your browser in a big, warm and fluffy security blanket that keeps malware from grabbing your personal data, and uses heuristics to identify potential threats; in effect, it allows users to “run everything in a virtual sandbox.” It even protects in the instance of a “dirty” PC that’s already been unwittingly infected by a prior install of malware. And the relevance to the Finovate audience? Seeing as many of the products on show relied on varying degrees of user data from zip code to full bank login details, VERY!
At the moment, Forcefield is only available as a local install but, in the network event afterwards, John told me that Checkpoint was working hard on an “on-demand solution”; definitely one to watch…
Fincision rating: 7/10
Sybase 365 (Cameron Franks)
I’m looking at my notes and thinking… …do I care! Sybase 365 is a mobile banking solution. Yawn. Sorry, its an “innovative new banking platform, turnkey solution” with “back office tools and operational management” from a company that owns and manages its own messaging network. And it interprets natural language. But I still don’t care. And I was very distracted by the really, REALLY poor demo which involved a blameless young lady attempting to do stuff on an iPhone. Unfortunately, the audience couldn’t see what was happening as, every time she needed to type in something, she picked up said phone and removed it from the projector’s field of view! It’s probably a neat product, and I’m being a bit harsh, but I just don’t care…
Fincision rating: 5/10 (neutral)
FiLife (Dave Kansas)
FiLife is the “website designed to find the product (you) need”. OK, its basically a directory site (albeit with 10,000 products from 1700 companies loaded at start-up) with comparison features to the fore, but I liked it nonetheless – there’s obviously a lot of thought gone into this product. FiLife only covers credit cards at the moment, but plans to cover the “entire personal finance landscape” eventually.
Back to the cards then… …their proprietary algorithm, which calculates a value to the user of owning a credit card (by sifting through your spending patterns to see if you really would get a cashback or other advertised incentive) is a clever feature which really did make the “simple inputs, rich outputs” claim come to life. The search input area itself was a bit of a Kayak rip-off, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of, however “The Stacker”, an animated, stickman-based visualisation of “where you stand against the nation” is original and (briefly) entertaining! And I loved the bubble search results representation, guys, even if it is a usability nightmare when there are a lot of results! LOL
If (and its a big “if”) FiLife can keep up the momentum by adding more innovative features, whilst also expanding their product coverage, they could be onto a real winner; another one to watch (and you have some very interested people in London, Dave!)
Fincision rating: 8/10
Vidoop (Mitchell Savage)
Vidoop has been “working for the last three years to solve a problem”, and that problem is the trade-off between usability & security. Vidoop makes the job of logging on to secure platforms easier for users and harder for hackers, and offers three different login options: verification by phone, image shield, and sms activation. Of the three, verification by phone was the coolest demo, particularly when the pc browser page changed when the user clicked a keypad value on a mobile phone. Image shield, which plays on the “recognition” (rather than recall) ability of a user, featured a set of click-able images as pass keys but was particularly interesting to me as the images could be sponsored in order to generate a revenue stream! SMS activation code was a plain ol’ boring 2 factor authentification by phone.
Vidoop is a bit like Forcefield in that, whilst it isn’t a pure finance application, it’s very relevant to the space, and delivers extremely well on it’s proposition. So much so that Charles Schwab are using it! I’m looking forward to catching up with Mitchell in London soon to find out more about his product, and whether or not he’s secured his international patents…
Fincision rating: 7/10 (but could be an 8 after next week)
BoulevardR (Matt Iverson)
I have to admit that BoulevardR was one of the companies I was especially here to check out; their personal finance management/advice app is of particular interest to me at the moment… …so, I was a little bit worried that we appeared to be 2 minutes into the 7, and Matt hadn’t said one word. Silence! He was waiting for his site to load. I guess presenting isn’t Matt’s strong point…
When he did eventually get going, I just got a bit confused about where he was pitching his product. Here’s me thinking this was a direct to consumer play, but no, my “members are small business owners”. Uh? Then there was also something about a co-development with Advanta (more below), but Matt had lost me at this point!
There were elements of the demo I liked, particularly the visual goal-setting (drag ‘n’ drop goals onto a timeline), but overall I just felt it was all a bit too clunky. OK, the flex interface was slick (once it had loaded), but I didn’t quite grasp how BoulevardR was using zip codes to “get data”, and I must admit to a sly smile on hearing the collective groan from the audience when Matt said “and at this point we run 1000 monte carlo simulations…”
BoulevardR’s aim of providing “comprehensive planning in a simple way” is noble, and the fact that they are working with Certified Financial Planners (CFPs) to develop their advice engine, even to the point of allowing users to simulate the monetary impact of future life events, is the right way to go. But, the execution is lacking, and I’m not the only one to have noticed; seems BoulevardR has a little bit of baggage to deal with, too…
Now, that Advanta tie-up… … I asked what this was all about during the networking session. It boils down to this: users can get a slimmed-down financial report (“Starter Roadmap”) for free, but must pay $79 for the full version, OR they can get the full version for free if they sign up to an Advanta credit card. Oh dear… … I wonder how their CFPs feel about encouraging users to get into debt in order to access a financial recommendation for free! LMAO
Fincision rating: 4/10 (2 points deducted for the inappropriate affiliate deal; that’s just lame, guys)
Inner8 (Doug Doyle)
Look out! Here comes another match.com reference: “We’re match.com for investors”. Privately-funded Inner8 finds users “investments that are soulmates” (as opposed to the soul-destroying ones everyone woke up to on the morning of the gig!)
How does this work? Inner8 “matches four different ways”: people to people, stocks to stocks, market conditions to stocks, and finally people to stocks. There are around 45 matching criteria involved, and “fuzzy logic” is employed to detect stocks that are “very likely to move with a chosen sector”.
So, Inner8 behaves like a socially-networked dating site, but helps you identify which stocks are bull or bear-friendly, and has, on first sight, a simple way of dealing with correlation. Wrong! Its actually quite a complex and extremely powerful way of handling “hidden correlations”, if not a little un-intuitive at times (there’s the potential for some weird, but stil technically correct, results). Given the potential complexity of the subject, Inner8 have done a superb job in dumbing down (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense) investment selection by borrowing heavily from another, more familiar, genre. I really like that idea and the execution, especially when you compare it to this overly-complex potential competitor!
As with Weseed, Inner8’s challenge will be in monetising their proposition and retaining user interest once real investments have been made. However, I’ve got a good feeling about Inner8…
Fincision rating: 8/10
Ratesurfer (Mitch Calderwood)
Ratesurfer is a desktop java-based “total credit card management” solution, which promises that “it’s gonna save whoever uses it money”. I almost switched off at this point, but I’m glad I didn’t…
The first little surprise came with the revelation that this app doesn’t use a 3rd party aggregator (such as the ubiquitous Yodlee), but instead uses a proprietary, desktop-based aggregation engine to collect credit card data. The second surprise was the demonstration of a “real-time balance transfer” between cards. Wow! This really does look clever. In fact, it’s almost too clever; I just can’t believe you can physically do that (neither did the people sat around me!)
Add in the ability to set alerts across all cards, including notifications of APR changes, and Ratesurfer does become worthy of a lot more investigation, even if it’s just to see whether that balance transfer thing isn’t just vapourware! Oh, and it looks sexy too…
Mitch says “you always get the credit you deserve”; time will tell, sir, but I’m on your side…
Fincision rating: 7/10
MyMoney (Brian Bellhorn)
MyMoney is a Facebook app (from FiServ’s Galaxy division; uh?) that provides “one-click access to all accounts” to “an audience with financial clout”. Whilst I get the fact that MyMoney is “practical, useful and satisifies a goal” to a certain extent, I’m struggling!
Don’t get me wrong, targeting Gen X & Y is absolutely the right way to go; these are the people disenfranchised by warm-body financial advisers who are chasing the HNW market instead (nothing wrong with that either!) But, c’mon, FACEBOOK? Absolutely the last place I’d go to manage my finances! Sure, its a big and expanding audience (1200 users added during the 7 minute Fiserv presentation), and Brian went through the web 2.0 finance checklist like a knife through butter (find new customers, enrol, cross-promote, secure one-click access, viral marketing), but why tie a decent product to one (actually, ANY) social network?
Personally, I don’t see social networking in its present guise lasting much longer; we’re over the hump, and there are brighter, shinier things out there already. So, sorry, I just don’t get it: its a neat product, but I don’t buy why it has to sit on THAT platform; maybe I’m too old to understand!
In an effort to appear more hip, I thought I’d catch up with the Fiserv guys to see if they could point me in the right direction, particularly as my UK-based clients might well be interested…
…so I tried to get a conversation going at the networking event, but was met with a rather terse response from their sales guy, plus an unexpected view of his considerable back. Guess what, big fellah, your attitude wins you the “Rudest Rep in Show” award, and a big raspberry from me!
Fincision rating: 2/10 mostly for the afters served up by the up-himself sales jock
Loanio (Michael Solomon)
Prior to Finovate, there was quite a bit of hype surrounding Loanio, a new peer-to-peer lending site. This is a VERY fluid marketplace, with recent comings & goings grabbing headlines along with reports of regulatory difficulties for some other players so, on the face of it, Loanio’s launch is either brave, foolhardy or inspired!
This is a sexy-looking web 2.0 site that went live at the beginning of October and “targets two distinct audiences – borrowers & lenders”. So far, so good, but I’m afraid my eyes glazed over when we got to “an exciting and innovative place for people looking for credit and investment opportunities!”
For a start, I just couldn’t get my head around the jointly-liable co-borrower thing. Enhancing the chances of success for an applicant with no or poor credit history by allowing people to share the liability for a slice of the action is innovative but, given recent events in the US lending space, is this wise?! Even if the Platinum service goes the extra mile in vetting applicants, I still get an uneasy feeling about all of this; or am I being unduly sensitive?
Ultimately, for all the hype, I was just a little bit bored by this presentation. Was this down to the subject matter? I though it might have been until I re-read my notes on Lending Club…
Fincision rating: 6/10
Time for a break. Part 2 will follow in a few days time…
Related posts:
Hey Mike-
Thanks for the insightful review post-Finovate. We really appreciate all of the feedback we get from the attendees and our beta testers. Your suggestions are definitely getting passed on to the rest of the team, and if you have any more suggestions, please feel free to let us know at community@weseed.com. Thanks again, and I hope you had as much fun at Finovate as we did.
Caitlin and the WeSeed Team
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the sum-up on Finovate 08! We enjoyed presenting Loanio, and it was also great to see what others in the online finance space are up to. With the current financial turmoil paving the way for a likely reshaping of the banking sector over the next decade or so, we think this is an especially interesting time for peer-to-peer lending.
Just to correct the record about Loanio’s co-borrower feature: co-borrower’s do not get a “slice of the action” on the loan, but act as extra insurance for the lender that the loan will be repaid, if the primary borrower defaults. This works exactly like a co-signer on a rent contract for an apartment. We imagine that co-borrowers will tend to be family members or close friends of the borrower.
Thanks again for the feedback from Finovate.
Thanks Mark & Caitlin for dropping by, and correcting me on the co-borrower feature! Your politeness in the face of my less-than-stellar comments about your product are admirable, and say a lot about you and your company. I wish you luck.
Mike,
Thanks for the honest critique of my Boulevard R demo. I’m generally not accustomed to demoing in front of 400 and trying to cover all our functionality in less than 7 minutes. You should try it some time, it’s not easy.
Boulevard R has members- the people who register with us. Since we ask about what they do for work, we also know that some are small business owners.
What we launched at Finovate was a site specifically for those small business owners, with appropriate content from financial planners. They have the option to get a free Professional Roadmap if they want. Advanta is one of the best small business credit cards out there. I’m not sure if you caught this, but this is not a personal credit card, but exclusively a small business card so your point on consumers getting into debt is lost on me.
To clarify, we use zip code data to adjust the calculations for cost of living, since someone living in San Francisco is going to have a very different cost of living than someone living in Cincinnati.
I’m not clear on your execution issue. What exactly are you referring to? The article you sited is over 10 months old and if you read the first comment on that story, you’d see my response. The back story is that the reporter’s editor called to apologize for how she reported it. Regardless, the issue with the buy a home calculation has been fixed. I’d like to hear more about our execution deficit. Are you speaking from personal experience?
You had sounded interested in how our approach might work for a client you have in the UK.
In fact, we’re moving from a B2C model to a B2B model, since we’re getting a lot of demand for white labeling our solution. In light of what’s happening in the market, consumers are really looking for independent, expert advice.
We’d be happy to talk with you about how we can be helpful, but in light of your comments we won’t be holding our breath.
@Matt -
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Matt (particularly as I’ve been quite critical of you & BouelvardR’s slot at Finovate) and for correcting my misunderstanding of your product.
For the record, I am still interested in what BoulevardR has to offer, and I think the B2B focus will certainly get some attention here in the UK, so I’ll be in touch, if you’ll still talk to me! LOL
Now, the “execution” issues: yes, I have been using the site, and have found a few things that I’m just not a fan of…
First off, I found the clock graphic which takes over my cursor when the app is loading to be a bit irritating and gimmicky. I also found the side panels that appear in the goal-setting wizard distracting, particularly when they changed without warning. Also, I changed all the values on the assumptions being made about my goals, but the panels still kept appearing – once completed, I felt they should have disappeared from view. At one point, I wanted to go back to check an input value, but when I hit my browser back button I ended up back at the sign-up page; it wasn’t what I expected…
When I got to the results page, I liked the simple shortfall presentation, but that ‘downsize your car’ tab just seemed so out of place, particularly as this was the first time there had been any mention of my car! Again, I found this unexpected and distracting.
I really liked the way that BouelvardR asks for the minimum of personal information at the most opportune time, i.e. on sign-up AFTER you’ve shown me that you’re worth signing up to, but I was expecting my Starter Roadmap to be available immediately, and not have to wait 24 hours.
Other UI irritations: the ‘loading’ of the app occurred several times in one session which got on my nerves after a while; I almost missed the accounts capture mechanism as it wasn’t obvious what I had to do (when there aren’t any accounts present, surely the label should be ‘create’ not ‘update’?), and the table of accounts appeared below the fold on my laptop; the truncation of the navigation labels in the left-hand accordion was another annoyance.
When I accessed the What-if section, it wasn’t immediately obvious what the effect of any of the scenario changes was. This is one place where the shortfall graphic device didn’t really work as the change in shortfall amount wasn’t sufficiently large enough to register with me (I was simulating losing my job, and not having an income for 3 months), and the shrink/grow animation effect lessened the impact even further!
I also clicked through on the “death of a spouse” graphic, but then got the option to simulate either my own death plus that of my spouse; confusing – I’d already made my decision about what I wanted to see, the additional option was yet another distraction!
I accessed my profile, and found that the left hand navigation style had changed markedly; I was momentarily confused about how I should exit. When I finally worked it out and clicked on the Dashboard link, I had to wait for the app to load again. AAAAARGH!
At this point, I’d had enough. I left the site with the nagging suspicion that my Starter Roadmap was already obsolete before it had arrived because I had subsequently input details about a number of my savings accounts!
Initial impressions? Poor usability, graphical & interaction design; flex technology getting in my way; nothing tangible to show for my efforts (have to wait for a report); and an overwhelming sense of frustration borne of the realisation that BoulevardR has probably got a good planning engine in the background, but the front end and supporting processes let it down. I’m also wondering why I have to wait for my Starter Roadmap; if there’s a compulsory offline element to this proposition, I’d be really worried about scaling and localising into other markets. I’m mystified as to why the report isn’t produced immediately.
So, that’s the long and short of it in terms of my ‘execution’ issues. I’d welcome your thoughts on the points I’ve raised, particularly if you feel that I’ve done you a dis-service (again!)
PS. I have actually tried the pressure-presenting thing, and you’re right, it’s bloody difficult. I found that, once I’d got over the embarrassment of it all, rehearsing in front of a mirror, or even going so far as to video myself for later review, was incredibly useful in identifying potential banana skins (and irritating gestures I didn’t even realise I was making!) Oh, and rehearsing with as much of the tech kit you’ll be using on the day is vital, too; IMHO it’s usually the tech that sets the dominoes tumbling.
Some light relief at the end of a long reply:
My most terrifying experience in front of an audience? Aged 16, playing my trumpet in a brass quintet, on a small stage right in the centre of a packed Royal Albert Hall. And just to up the ante, there were another 4 million people watching live on BBC TV. To this day, I cannot recall a single second of that performance, although I remember that, immediately afterwards, I used some colourful language in shouting through the applause to tell the tuba player when to bow to the royal box, and then realising it’d all been picked up on a nearby mic… …whoops!
Hello Mike,
Thanks for your coverage of Finovate. We enjoyed the show, too.
Just wanted to follow up on a couple points in your note. Re: our decision to target the Facebook platform to launch the MyMoney application … you’re right to call out that the product doesn’t have to be limited to Facebook. As we explore new directions for MyMoney, we may well expand it to include other platforms and capabilities. Our research showed that Facebook was a good place to start due to its popularity with younger generations and its viral nature that helps banks and credit unions leverage the platform to connect with customers/members. But as you say, we’re certainly considering the “brighter, shinier” platforms that are growing, too.
Re: your disappointing experience in the networking session – I do believe this was a misunderstanding and nothing more sinister. The personnel working the session are equally passionate about the MyMoney product and love to talk about it. Our table was deep with Finovate attendees engaged in conversations, so if you felt slighted, it certainly was inadvertent and the team apologizes. We’re more than happy to schedule an individual conversation at your convenience to answer any of your questions.
@Brian Bellhorn –
Thanks for dropping by, Brian! The networking thing’s gone; itsa brand new dawn! I’d be interested in your thoughts on where you go next with MyMoney – not just platforms, but the build out of functionality too; let’s chat…
@Mike Linskey –
Thanks for all the great feedback. You raise some good points and here are my brief responses:
- We just rolled out a new version of the Starter Roadmap and we presently have a manual QA process where we review the document before we approve it to be sent out. In the process, we’ve found some ways to make the algorithm even more accurate for certain use cases (young savers, high income spenders, etc.). Part of this is having to explain the results, so for someone making $200k/year, but only saving 4% a year, we have to caveat their result and describe why we’re giving them a yellow light. Once we feel confident that the evaluation system we’ve set in place works for all the use cases, it will be a fully automated system (while the Professional Roadmap will always be a manual process where Certified Financial Planners™ prepare the plans).
- Part of what you’re experiencing on the Dashboard/Your Plan with the different sections reloading is our integration of our older html pages that had embedded Flex with the new all Flex interface. We’re working on fixing that.
- I agree that there might be other more impactful ways to simulate “What If” scenarios. Maybe a cash flow chart based on the time period defined in the popup.
- Your other UI comments are valid and we’ll look into them. Thanks for taking the time to go into so much detail.
Sure, we’d still like to talk. Feel free to respond back to Jon’s email when you’re ready.
Just to let you know, Mike, WeSeed launched into public beta this weekend, and we’re asking for everyone who can to join up and let us know what we need to work on more to make the site even better. I would really love to get some more feedback from you in particular because of your articulate post, and I’d enjoy seeing you on the forums. Again, please let me know if I can answer any questions or if you need anything at all. Thanks again.
Caitlin & the WeSeed Team
@Brian Bellhorn –
Mike — The teams are exploring the next direction for MyMoney and other complementary Fiserv products even as I write this. As soon as we’re ready to roll, we’ll make certain we set up a briefing for you, and to get your feedback. Does that work? Thanks again for your interest.
@Brian Bellhorn –
That’s great Brian, I’d be happy to pitch in! Looking forward to hearing more from your team…
Hi Mike
Really interesting reviews, thanks. I’m a long-time Quicken user and am desperately trying to avoid going onto MS Money. Wish Intuit would launch Quicken online in this country; I’d pay them well for it.
Do you know of any similar online offerings for personal money management etc?
Really enjoy the site, and am interested in moodoh progress. We met briefly at the IFP conference, you may remember.
Cheers
Pete
@Pete Matthew -
Hi Pete; thanks for dropping by! I think you might be interested in Thrive (www.justthrive.com), which uses the same aggregation engine as Mint but is available for UK users! There’ll be a review of it in Finovate Part II which I’ll be publishing early next week.
As for Moodoh, there’ll be another post later this week, but Matt & I are still knee-deep with the day jobs, so progress has been limited. Having said that, I spent most of the flight to New York for Finovate sketching out screen designs for our first Moodoh app, so on paper at least, we have some dynamite stuff (according to the Exec from BT who I was sat next to)!