Wesabe is a new Web site that lets you manage your financials. It’s like a Web-based Quicken, with Web 2.0 stuff thrown in — for example, the customary tagging and social networking.
You register, and then you’re prompted to upload you bank account, credit card and other financial information (it holds you hand as you import the data directly from your bank’s site). It then provides your balances on one page, so you can have an overview of how you’re doing.
Click on the image below for a tour. You’ll see tags on the right hand side, which you can use to categorize as you enter your finances. So if you list a receipt from Starbucks, you can tag it as “food,” for example.
You’ll need to try it out yourself. To be honest, after watching the demo, it wasn’t compelling enough for us to upload our private banking data to a Web start-up that we have no experience with. But maybe that’s just us. (We risked uploading our credit card data, but the site didn’t recognize CapitalOne.) Still, if you’ve got problems saving, and want to chat with others and get support and tips for your goals, this might be worth trying.
Here’s a post by Liz Gannes about Wesabe, where we saw it first.
The company was founded by Jason Knight and Marc Hedlund, who are self-funding the six-person, Berkeley, Calif. company. Knight is a former marketing exec, while Hedlund worked at O’Reilly Media after co-founding Popular Power and Lucas Online.
9 Comments
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Harish Babu said:
Interesting Concept.
But as you mentioned, I won’t be able to trust the site unless my Bank website displays “Wesabe” affiliate.
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Andrei Marinescu said:
I’m not sure that I fully buy into the web 2.0 value that exists in this space - are most people really going to benefit from receiving questionable advice from others like them (vs. a professional financial advisor)? Why not use the MoneyCenter application offered by Yodlee (and used by a number of financial institutions, including Bank of America)? It offers tagging, tracking, bill reminders and a calendar - just no community aspect.
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Pran said:
Why would you put your personal info online? Well, everyone said similar things about Salesforce. Why would any company put their sales info online? Its certainly a stretch at this point. But then you never know. Not everyone uses quicken or other such software. A tie in with financial institutions will be a must for this company. Otherwise, its a scary thought at best from an end user perspective.
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Farhad said:
My understanding is that the community aspect is around reducing expenses, such as auto insurance, groceries, stock trades, as well as perhaps to higher interest rate accounts, etc. Not sure I buy the value prop either, unless the core is really around ease-of-use. The tagging would help there.
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Leon said:
I have to smile on this one. :)
Hmmm. Put my credit info on a web site that I don’t know. And get strangers to help me with my finances.
Some day I might. But definitely not today.
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Swapan said:
Wesable service reminds me of Yoodle and myCFO.com in mid 1990s. Both the companies had a very similar value proposition. Yoodle had a very hard time convincing consumers to share their personal and financial information with them, since Yoodle was not a financial institution, hence no oversight. They ended changing the business model and became a service/software provider to financial institutions like Fidelity. Wesable will face similar issues. Web 2.0 (technology) is just an enabler, but the business issues remain the same as they were in mid 1990s.
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Martin Edenström - www.what.se said:
And we thought Gmail was daring? Tssks. No way this will work.
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Marc Hedlund said:
This is great! You’re all helping discourage any potential competitors! :)
I completely understand why people would make the objections they do above. I’m glad for it — if everyone were willing to throw personal financial data on any site that asks for it, the world would be much worse off. I do think, though, that these comments are typical of people who haven’t looked at the site and what we offer. What we’re hearing from the people who give it a try — even without uploading their data — is that they love it. Of course there are early bugs to work out, but there’s a lot of value in what we’re doing and we hear that repeatedly every day.
On the question of data security and privacy, I’d encourage you to check out our “Data Bill of Rights” (linked on our home page) — we’ve taken a strong stand on this, and we think this will help make the service more usable. Worth a look.
Thanks for the write-up, and I hope you’ll give us a try.
-Marc
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ZingIT » Blog Archive » Wesabe - Web 2.0 meets personal finance said:
[...] Wesabe reviewed at Wired, Lifehacker, Gigaom, BoingBoing, OpenSourceCU, VentureBeat, PersonalFinanceZen, A Whole Lotta Nothing, Consumerist, LunchMeet (video interview), [...]