Report From Finovate '08: Round 3
We spent yesterday at Finovate, a yearly roundup of new personal finance services available online. Here's a recap of some of the afternoon presentations, including a mortgage comparison service that promises greater transparency, a new credit simulator feature from Credit Karma, and a site that uses reverse auctions to get banks to bid on your money.
SmartHippo
SmartHippo says the mortgage process is too complicated for consumers, with too much data hidden from plain view. Their service focuses on transparency in the home lending process. Imagine everyone in your company trading info on their salaries before the next employee review—HR wouldn't like it, but it would arm you with info you didn't previously have, to better negotiate for yourself. SmartHippo lets users build lending profiles and share information on their mortgage rates and lenders, so that you can compare notes before you settle on a rate of your own. Lenders also have a presence on the site and can share their rates directly.
The service claims to be truly transparent in collecting and sharing data among users—no bait and switch with interest rates. This month, they're rolling out a revamped rate search engine that pulls data from over 200 lenders. They claim that since lenders don't purchase position in their database, it's a great way to see what are frequently better rates from small banks and credit unions that you wouldn't otherwise see, since they don't have large advertising budgets to get the word out to consumers. If you try it out, let us know what you think.
Credit Karma
We’ve previously recommended Credit Karma, which offers a near-FICO estimate of your credit score for free. Their new tool is a Credit Simulator, where you can play out various scenarios—applying for a new credit card, taking out a personal loan, making six months of on-time payments, declaring bankruptcy—to see how they affect your score.
MoneyAisle
This is an online auction site where banks compete for your CD and high yield savings account business. The banks participate in a true reverse auction in real time, using bots to increase rates until a winner emerges. The founder emphasizes that this is not comparison shopping or sponsored bids—it's basically eBay in reverse, where participating banks compete for you.
The site is four months old and has around 100 participating banks and credit unions, so they admit that they don't always have the very best rate, but the number of institutions are increasing. On the other hand, they also don't allow low-rated rated banks to participate, so bids will only come from "healthy" institutions.
Yodlee
Yodlee's new offering is called PayToday through their BillPay partnership with Western Union. Through Yodlee you can pay immediately-due bills (as in, it's due today) with over 1,000 billers. It's not cheap at $15 per use, but it "solves the problem of last-minute payments."
One interesting note if you're into finding weird little ways to save money: Yodlee says if you're paying $5-10k a month on a mortgage payment, making last-minute payments can actually work out cheaper than regular payments, because it buys you a couple days more float time on your funds each month.
Mint
Mint's big news is that it officially left beta today, and that it now offers lots of investment tracking tools.
Thrive from Loudwater Labs
Thrive—which looks a little like a citrus-flavored version of Mint—attempts to combine the data reporting that every personal finance site offers with some level of advice and financial planning. We're not sure how Thrive makes money, though, and when we checked out the question on their FAQ, they didn't provide much info on that either, although they announced yesterday that they've partnered with Credit.com.
Fun features: a numerical "Financial Health" score calculated based on your data, and interesting factoids like "You can survive without a job for n days," "You can afford a home priced at n dollars," and "You can retire on n per month."
BillShrink
We've discussed BillShrink before—the site finds the most valuable credit card offers for you, and lets you adjust your criteria quickly (and anonymously) to search for specific types of offers.
They've launched a third service called My Account, which lets you register with the site so that it can keep tabs on your criteria and keep updating the best offers for you.
Post a comment
Comments:
@dartmouth05: I love mint. It's SSL encrypted with an AES 256 bit key so it's as secure as it can be.
until someone hacks their servers or an employee loses a laptop. i always find it ironic that mint pops up so often on gawker sites, often on the same main page as some large merchant data breach...
The problem with the smarthippo idea is that no one is ever honest about their credit, let alone on a public site. People just don't want to share their private financial information with 200 people. The difference between rates is rarely that different. The difference is the quality of service -- including a lender who has th experience to tell you when to lock in. I don't understand how this online tool can handle the complexity of the mortgage business. Financial services simply isn't the same as shopping for the best price on a fridge. We used Voyant (www.planwithvoyant.com) to compare our current financial plan to a new plan with a refinance. After the approximate $5K to refinance, we didn't come out ahead even with a much lower rate. Refinancing isn't always a good idea and not many lenders will tell you that.
The problem with the smarthippo idea is that no one is ever honest about their credit, let alone on a public site. People just don't want to share their private financial information with 200 lenders. The difference between rates is rarely that different. The difference is the quality of service -- including a lender who has th experience to tell you when to lock in your rate. I don't understand how this online tool can handle the complexity of the mortgage business. Financial services simply isn't the same as shopping for the best price on a fridge. We used Voyant (www.planwithvoyant.com) to compare our current financial plan to a new plan with a refinance. After the approximate $5K to refinance, we didn't come out ahead even with a much lower rate. Refinancing isn't always a good idea and not many lenders will tell you that.
@cathycameron: @cathycameron: I think you misunderstood SmartHippo a little. No personal data is recorded or collected. You simply plug in some data to the search engine that will match you up with applicable mortgages. From there you can choose to apply to any of them directly through the financial institution. There are no transactions through SmartHippo, it's simply matching you up with the best rates and from there you can select a lender.
On the second point--I absolutely agree that quality of service is important which is where the user reviews come in handy. If someone quotes an inaccurate rate--or on the other hand--is extremely helpful and knowledgeable, the user can come back on the site and write a review to help other users make smart decisions when selecting a lender.
If you have any other questions about SmartHippo, please feel free to email me directly at kelly (at) smarthippo.com. Thanks!
Kelly Rusk
Community Manager
SmartHippo
@cathycameron: @cathycameron: BTW-It's flattering that you are following SmartHippo around the web and using misinformation to put us down and make Voyant look good, but along with posing as a consumer and not a company rep, it's a pretty dishonest tactic and I personally would not trust my money with a company that thinks that's alright...
Kelly Rusk, SmartHippo.
Is Mint safe to use? It sounds great in theory, but I'm leary about giving a third party all my banking info.