Finextra revealed the results of a Fiserv survey (full press release here) which suggests that Americans prefer to access personal finance management (PFM) tools through banking sites.
Security is given as the reason for this, outweighing the possible advantages offered by third-party account aggregation tools such as Mint in the US, or Money Dashboard in the UK.
The poll of 3000 online banking users shows strong interest in PFM tools for tracking and analysing spending, with nearly 40% of respondents saying they would help manage finances. However, only 15% of respondents had used a PFM service in the previous 90 days. Of those, 68% did so from online banking sites, more than double the percentage that reported using the “top named” traditional PFM software or the “top-ranked” third party Web site.
Trust
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the results of a Yodlee survey which suggested that there was a strong demand for PFM tools in the UK – I made the point in that post that the key to the take up of these tools will be trust. The masses do not appear to be ready to handover account login details to third-parties who they may not have heard of before – which should be viewed as an opportunity by the banks.
It’s worth mentioning that a couple of big financial institutions, Egg and First Direct, have had some success with their aggregation tools (running from as far back as 2001 and 2004 respectively).
photo credit: Rafa.Garcés