Wesabe's Two Big Moves

Shilling for our portfolio again, but I think this is interesting.

Wesabe has done two things in the past week that are worth paying attention to.

1 - they released a full API that effectively means your bank now as an API

2 - they released a firefox uploader that really is a game changer in getting your financial information onto the web

Co-founder Marc Hedlund has a great post on O'Reilly's Radar explaining why all this matters.

Comments

[Ara]

I've been using Wesabe for a few months now and if they did nothing other than automatic upload via the Wesabe Uploader and the tag based budget management it'd be worth it. I used to use Excel and this saves me hours upon hours every month. I have a feeling Wesabe is going to be huge--it's something basically every adult will find useful.

[DeVer Warner]

If it's going to be huge, the service is going to have to be friendlier and more intuitive to mainstream adults. Downloading bank statements or using the Wesabe Uploader seems to be clumsy and generally easier said than done. Is automatic updating an impossible security hurdle? That's what would keep me using it.

[Fraser]

The automatic uploading through the firefox extension is going to solve a minor headache that I've had with the service for a few months. It will transition wesabe from a once a week tool that I used to manage my finances to the centralized source that I will use daily to manage everything. That alone is cool and I suspect that as the service evolves the implementation of this step will become even easier (which should alleviate some of Warner's concerns).

However, when I saw last week that the developer api was released I jumped for joy. Take a thriving community of users (a market) + a critical aspect of life in management of finances (a need) and you have nice incentive for a number of developers to create beneficial applications with this data.

Again, well done on the investment but kudos to the Wesabe team for pushing these two features in quick succession.

I can't wait to see what various applications will come out from the api. I guess you can think of Wesabe as a platform for web 2.0 financial management.... a very cool thought experiment for what the future can hold.

[Ara]

DeVer:
Agreed. For my particular banks and CCs setting up the uploader was just a matter of selecting the institution and providing U/P. In fact I tried to set up the Firefox extension and while my CC set up automatically like with the uploader, it wanted to have me manually tell it how to extract data from the bank and it was really pretty confusing. So I've gone back to using the uploader for now. I imagine they'll be working on making this process as automatic as possible for as many institutions they can going forward.

They will have to work on making the thing friendlier, but I think they have the right ideas and they're on the right track.

[Eric]

Huge time saver. I have been using Wesabe for awhile now and uploading the latest statements on time and weekly has slowed me down. I finally got into tagging everything and graphing out some patterns - what a difference! I have been following the debate about the banks in this whole thing and I believe we have not seen the end of it. Finally someone is mashing up financial info - my only fear is the focal point of many peoples financial information. I know there are disclaimers and protections in place, but the simple idea of data collection here and analysis of spending patterns is amazing.

[Matt]

One word: Yodlee.

Yawn.