As personal financial management software gains traction at banks, vendors are starting to tinker with its long-established formula.
Under the original model, aggregation technology collects users' account balances and transactions and helps them figure out where their money is going.
Two new approaches have dropped aggregation, however. Bundle Corp., a start-up backed by Citigroup Inc. and Microsoft Corp., is promoting a service that complements social networking and helps users compare their spending patterns to those of their peers. And this week Fiserv Inc. rolled out a PFM service that focuses on bill presentment and lets people manage their finances according to their coming expenses.
More banks are looking to provide advanced features to spice up their online banking services for customer niches, said Nicole Sturgill, the research director for delivery channels at TowerGroup. "PFM is itself a trend in online banking," she said, and "there are so many ways of defining PFM."
"What we've seen is that banks are really looking at the pieces," Sturgill said.
Jaidev Shergill, Bundle's chief executive, said he wanted to make the New York company's service stand out from the standard aggregation services, which generally deliver similar features. "We knew that we would hit a wall if it was only data," he said.
By linking Bundle to the social media sites operated by Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., Bundle is trying to create "the cycle where user-generated content — coupled with the data — brings the site to life," Shergill said.
Rather than ask users to contribute their own data — the cornerstone of aggregation-based PFM services from companies like Wesabe Inc. or Intuit Inc.'s Mint — Bundle relies on financial data from huge pools of consumers, including anonymized account details provided by Citibank and transaction records from other sources.
All this information can be used to see, for example, how much a young couple in New York might expect to pay on average for rent, or a growing family in San Francisco should budget for entertainment expenses.
Bundle users can sort spending data by geography, age range, income range and other demographics and can drill down for a detailed look at each category. Any data points that users unearth can be immediately uploaded over Facebook or Twitter. Shergill said this allows people to share the results with their immediate circle, rather than confining any potential online debate to Bundle's Web site, which went live Jan. 20 and, at least for now, is not widely used.
Shergill said this provides people with a better view of the big picture than they can gain from just evaluating their own financial details.
"With only the bank's data you can't do what we're doing," Shergill said. "Every bank is only going to have a certain percentage of someone's wallet."
Shergill was previously the president of Citi Ventures, where he developed the idea for Bundle, which was incorporated in June of last year.
Citi, Microsoft and Morningstar Inc. have all invested in Bundle, though Shergill would not say how much each company contributed or whether any of them owns a majority share.
Fiserv's PFM offering focuses on upcoming bills, by putting the company's bill presentment front and center in the latest version of its Corillian Online software. The default configuration for the online banking application displays thumbnail images of any upcoming bills to which Fiserv has access.
Erich Litch, Fiserv's senior vice president and general manager of consumer services for the electronic banking services group, said that shifting the focus from aggregation to future spending reflects how people interact with their primary bank.
