PNC Fattens its Virtual Wallet

Bank Technology News | August, 2010

Institutions and card firms are ramping up work on budgeting and spending tools, and that includes PNC, which has added a number of enhancements to its Virtual Wallet.

The new features are designed to expand the product’s appeal beyond its original Gen Y target to a broader swath of customers. These features, which were based in part on feedback from consumers though the Virtual Wallet blog and Twitter accounts, include a budgeting option that enables users to form budgets for spending categories; card tracking to provide a picture of all card spending in one place; and new alerts that monitor various kinds of spending over a timeline.

Virtual Wallet is the bank’s online and mobile money management tool, including a ìspendî function for banking and bill pay; a ìreserveî account for short-term savings and overdraft protection; and high-yield growth accounts. Another provision is ìdanger days,î or a feature which warns customers of days in which they may be at risk of an account overdraw.

The product has attracted an average of 3,500 account openings per week this year. It was introduced about a year ago to help college students and their parents with money management. The financial services industry has seen the growth of a number of sites and products—ranging from PFM sites to products such as MasterCard’ inControl—that are designed in some way to either track or help consumers budget, control and curtail spending in the down economy.