In November, Wesabe and the UK newspaper giant The Telegraph entered a partnership to offer co-branded tools on the Telegraph website.
Wesabe anonymously aggregates data from it's customers to provide tips and recommendations for it's members. Importantly, they've got data that spans the market, something that banks themselves have tried (with account aggregation) and largely not been able to make work very well. Wesabe applies wisdom of the crowd thinking to personal finance and debt.
Wesabe Mobile is available which also provides members with an easy way to record and track where they are spending cash. Wesabe holds out the promise to help consumers validate their financial decisions based on what other people like them are doing. Wesabe is both versatile and powerful. You can set spending targets, monitor your account on a mobile and download a Vista gadget for instant account access. Wesabe is rolling out new graphs to more easily allow users to track spending and monitor their income.
Wesabe cleverly uses two levels of tags: one for “just this entry” and another for “each time this transaction occurs”. This is powerful, but can be confusing, too. Wesabe is different, in that it is re-defining financial advice, and references in a banking context. Wesabe allows you to tag all your line items (expenses, deposits, etc) with arbitrary tags, so you can easily view groups of transactions. Within any tag you can set up spending targets and it will show you how close or far to that goal you are for the month at any given point.
A new feature of Wesabe, the Cutback Tool, focuses on a specific part of the problem, probably the one most easily controlled; namely, recurring fees and expenses. The Cutback Tool flags all your recurring expenses, then shows you how much money you’d save annually if you reduced or eliminated the spending. The tips provided are not perfect, but they are already useful in the many markets where the company has a concentration of users and it will get better and better as more users contribute more data.
Wesabe a very innovative solution for getting your financial data into a nice clean format that is ripe for analysis. On a higher level, they are using the wisdom of crowds to try teach us personal finance best practices. They interact amazingly closely with customers. For example, Wesabe usues collective wisdom to tell you how much you are spending on your services – say, car insurance – relative to its other users, and showing tips that are relevant to the tags you choose. Wesabe has nothing like the rich functionality of Quicken. It is basically a community site where you can upload your financials to manage your budget.
Wesabe uses a downloadable application to keep you safer – no credentials are stored on their website. The service utilizes SSL connections and authentication – keeping member data safe and private yet readily available. Wesabe spends a lot of time and energy trying to build up trust. That's a good move.
Wesabe has three advantages over Quicken:
- It’s only online.
- It has added tagging to transactions that are shared among users - when enough users tag a specific merchant, that tag is automatically added as a suggestion to your transaction.
- It is security-focused. Your third-party bank and credit card account credentials are not stored on Wesabe’s servers – instead they are downloaded to your personal computer. Hackers can’t access your account credentials by breaking into Wesabe’s servers.
