Meca Software, the third-largest player in personal finance software, is making a grab for market share by introducing two pared-down versions of its flagship product, Managing Your Money.
The new products, Managing Your Money Lite and Ultralite, are meant to "give banks products that appeal to every segment of their customer base," said Paul Harrison, Meca's president and chief executive.
Through the product launches, scheduled for later this year, Meca aims to make up ground on a pair of larger competitors: Intuit Inc., whose Quicken software claims the lion's share of the personal finance market; and Microsoft Corp., whose Money software has almost twice as many users as Managing Your Money.
All three products let customers pay bills, conduct general business with their bank, and manage their finances in a comprehensive way.
But just as most people do not balance their checkbooks, Mr. Harrison said, most potential home banking customers do not want all the functions of an advanced financial software tool.
"What most people want is to be able to do ATM-type transactions in their homes," Mr. Harrison said. "All they want is an electronic checkbook."
Meca's forthcoming Ultralite product includes only the ability to pay bills, download bank statements, transfer money between accounts, and send electronic mail messages to a bank. The Lite product adds a check register and the ability to group payments into categories.
By contrast, the full Managing Your Money product, which is 13 years old, lets customers track investments and do tax and estate planning, among other things.
Meca, which is based in Fairfield, Conn., plans to license the three products individually to banks.
"This is a great customer acquisition tool," Mr. Harrison said. "Once someone gets comfortable with a lighter product, they can start to expand out to a more fully-loaded product."
Another company that has seized on the strategy of offering simple home banking software with a minimum of functions is Home Financial Network of Westport, Conn., whose chairman and chief executive, Daniel M. Schley, held those positions at Meca for more than a decade.
"The high-end market is at or near saturation, and this middle or mass market is an open field," Mr. Schley said.
"The second generation PC purchaser is a far more task-oriented individual who is far less inclined to be interested in a total financial management system," he added. "They look at Money and Quicken and say, 'Gee, isn't that a lot of overkill for what I want to do."'
Meca is owned by five banks: NationsBank Corp., BankAmerica Corp., First Bank System Inc., Fleet Financial Group, and Royal Bank of Canada. Mr. Harrison said the ownership gives Meca a foot in the door with 40 million consumers who do business with the banks.
One owner, NationsBank, began offering Managing Your Money to customers in April. Since then, the product has garnered 40,000 subscribers, said Smita Quinn, the PC banking product manager for NationsBank.
"Managing Your Money is definitely going to be the cornerstone of our strategy now," Ms. Quinn said. "We plan to upgrade that product and offer more services through it."
At Microsoft and Intuit, spokesmen said their companies did not feel threatened by Meca's new product lines.
"Quicken has a lot more depth, and I think people have spoken with their money," said Sheryl Ross of Intuit. "Years ago, Meca was number one, and then we sort of ate their lunch."
Richard K. Crone, an independent banking consultant in Irwindale, Calif., predicted that "lighter" home banking software would be eclipsed by the Internet. Customers who might be attracted to such a product could more easily conduct the same transactions through a bank's Web site, he said.
"What we should be striving for is direct digital access for demand deposit accounts," Mr. Crone said. "Messing around with any client side software could end up being a fatal distraction."
