In April 2008, Jwaala was invited to participated in the Silicon Valley based, Finovate Startup conference in San Francisco. This event is put on by the same great people behind the Online Banking Report and Netbanker blog.

It turns out Jwaala walked away with the Best of Show award among the 40 companies that presented! Companies including Mint, Wesabe, Andera, and Prosper. This was a very welcome surprise to us, so thanks to all those in the audience that voted for us.

If your interested, our 6 minute Finovate video is posted here.

Apparently yes! At least according to a recent post at the NetBanker blog by Jim Bruene.

Jim has been keeping tabs on the adoption rates of Personal Finance Tools, both the straight to consumer variety (like Mint and Wesabe) and the financial institution variety (like Wells Fargo and Bank of America).

The latest data shows Bank of America sporting over 2.5 Million (yes, million) users of it’s online personal finance tool call My Portfolio.

As you all know, Jwaala MoneyTracker is a solution that enables banks and credit unions to seamlessly add Online Personal Finance Tools to their existing online banking solutions.

One of the questions we hear over and over is “do consumers really want this?”. Of course we think so, and so do our current customers. We think this latest data from Bank of America further backs up this point … consumers want/need online Personal Finance Tools.

If you are a bank or a credit union, the question boils down to this …

Are you going to provide Online Personal Finance Tools, or are you going to let your very own customers get this capability somewhere else?

Customers are slippery these days, loyalty is almost a thing of the past. With all the great online tools out there, it’s easy to swap from Bank A to Bank B, and consumers are certainly willing to do that at the drop of a hat.

Best Perk! CNNMoney did just did a great piece on Credit Unions, what are they and how they are often a better deal. One of the Credit Unions discussed was Amplify FCU in Austin TX. Amplify just happens to be a Jwaala MoneyTracker customer, and CNNMoney awarded them BestPerk for their MoneyTracker service!

Best perk: Members of Amplify Federal Credit Union in Austin can use the credit union’s online bank [MoneyTracker] to track all their financial accounts (including those outside of Amplify). It’s like Quicken, only free.

Of course, members of Amplify Credit Union already know this, but it’s good to see that Amplify is getting some help from CNN to spread the word.

The NetBanker blog has a great post discussing online personal finance solutions for their upcoming Finovate 2007 conference. The 2 profiled companies are Jwaala and Mint. This is an interesting comparison as both companies approach the solution in completely different ways.

Mint provides a straight to consumer site for doing basic things like categorizing your spending and aggregating accounts. Mint completely bypasses, (dis-intermediates if you like big words), the financial institution. The end result is that the financial institution looses the “eyeballs” of their own customers! This gives Mint the opportunity to basically promote products and services to the financial institution’s customers, and boy to they take advantage of that in a big BIG way. Mint basically encourages their users to switch their checking, savings, and credit accounts to competitive financial institutions. This spells big big trouble for financial institutions.

Jwaala on the other hand focuses on providing personal financial solutions that help the banks and credit unions. Our MoneyTracker product is branded for the bank or credit union, has the same URL as the bank or credit union, and works seamlessly with the bank or credit unions existing online banking. It’s a different approach, but one that does not put the financial institutions on the defensive.

Jwaala recently presented a MoneyTracker break-out session during the summer CUISPA meeting in Boston. Our session had larger attendance than we expected, so afterwords I asked the coordinator how he introduced our session right before the break-out.

Well, it turns out the coordinator told the audience “I would switch financial institutions” for this product. Now that explains it!

We have always felt the same way, but of course we are biased. It was very warming indeed to hear that others have the same view. The session went great, with plenty of great questions and interest from the Credit Union professionals that attended.

For those of you all not familiar with CUISPA … CUISPA is a national association of credit union information technology professionals focused on improving security and risk management through cooperation. It’s a great forum for Credit Union IT pros (especially those with a security focus) to come together and learn best practices.

Thanks CUISPA!

One of our customer’s (Amplify FCU) has recently come out with a new marketing program that highlights the ways Amplify helps their members “live more, bank less”.  Personally, we love the new “live more, bank less” tag line, it just has a ring of truth to it!  At the end of the day, no matter how fancy or great or slick a Credit Union makes their branches, people would just rather go to the park.  So the key is make sure you also focus on making products and services that are efficient and genuinely helpful.And hence, Amplify has their Five Ways Amplify Helps you Bank Less and Live More …

And guess what made #2 ?  Well, take a look for yourself:

• Amplified Checking with up to 5.1% APY
• MoneyTracker
• MobileBanking
• Mortgage Loans
• Home Equity Loans

Wow, what’s not to like about an article whose title goes “MoneyTracker Beats Intuit’s FinanceWorks To The Punch”. We were a little surprised when we saw that title, surprised and pleased. In general we are no fans of the Quicken model of making financial institutions pay for the priveledge of having the user experience taken away.

You can read the whole article either in the July 23rd print edition of the Credit Union Journal, or online at cujournal.com (registration required unfortunately). Also unfortunately, I can’t just reprint the article here, sigh…

While we are the subject of Quicken and Intuit, it looks like they are making progress releasing there FinanceWorks solution. You can not really learn more by watching the customer video.

We’d like to thank Karen Pollack of Amplify FCU out of Austin TX. Karen is the Vice President of Operations, and has been a great advocate and champion of the MoneyTracker product.

This case study posted on Credit Union TechTalk does a great job of describing the tight collaboration that occurred between Jwaala (the creater of MoneyTracker) and Amplify FCU. The end result ? A product that hits the mark and delights members, all while providing additional ROI for the financial institution. We love a win win.

Thanks Karen!

We are happy as can be to announce our partnership with the fine folks from Trust Data Solutions. Located in Dallas TX, Trust Data Solutions has a deep understanding of the Symitar platform and is well respected in the Symitar community. Even more, they have a history of bringing compelling technology solutions to market, what a perfect match with Jwaala.

As word has gotten out on the MoneyTracker product, we have found ourselves talking to more and more Credit Unions that use the Symitar core processing platform. With Trust Data, we have found a partner to help us build a seamless and powerful integration with Symitar. This literally makes deploying MoneyTracker into Symitar shops a “piece of cake”.

“Symitar is a very popular and robust platform for the Credit Union market, we had several Credit Unions clamoring for MoneyTracker support, so it just made sense to include this out of the box.” says Andrew Taylor, CTO of Jwaala.

“Working with Jwaala just seemed to make sense, the MoneyTracker product is something that has broad appeal across the Credit Union market, and especially within the Symitar market, where the Credit Unions have a tendency to be more innovative” says Greg Varnell from Trust Data.

Well said Greg!

Wow, what a nice surprise. Just out of the blue, Jim Bruene, the publisher of the Online Banking Report and the great NetBanker blog has awarded MoneyTracker his “best of the web” award!

Head on over to the article and check it out. He is basically a big fan of the built in alerting and RSS capabilities of MoneyTracker. For those of you who don’t know, MoneyTracker makes RSS feeds available for a members individual accounts, and also makes an RSS feed available that consolidates transactions across all accounts. If you are into RSS, it’s really quite nice.

In addition, MoneyTracker allows you to turn any search into a custom RSS feed. This means that a member can search on “ATM over 100″, and then have a custom RSS feed available that matches this type of transaction, basically any ATM transaction over $100. This literally means that is an infinite (well, almost) number of possible RSS feeds, and it is completely up to the member. Of course, if a member is not into RSS, he can also have this information delivered as an Email or Text message.

Thanks for the award Jim!