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There are plenty of companies now with tools that let people slice and dice their own financial data, but the updated Bundle application set to go live Friday will also let users compare their own spending habits against their peers'.
August 25
TheStreet.com Inc. is taking another bite of the personal financial management apple.
The New York media company said Monday it has entered a content-sharing deal with Bundle Corp., a PFM site that focuses on providing analysis using publicly available spending data. The content-sharing deal is reminiscent of TheStreet.com's 2008 purchase of 13% of the PFM provider Geezeo Inc., which also involved content sharing.
Bundle provides its audience with anonymized spending data from Citigroup Inc., which is one of its backers, and from other sources. Through the Bundle deal, TheStreet.com is given access to some data that cannot typically be seen through the tools on Bundle's website; this data can then be used in news articles. Bundle, of New York, would then be able to republish those articles as well as provide readers with access to similar data on its website so readers could conduct their own analysis.
Followers of the PFM space say the best spot for these tools is bank websites, since consumers typically trust their banks with their financial data more than they do any third party. Geezeo, for example, eventually changed its own business model to reflect this, shutting down its consumer-facing website to instead provide software directly to banks.
Jaidev Shergill, Bundle's chief executive, disagreed with that conclusion. "It is still to be proven whether a bank-based PFM and aggregation model is going to win or not," he said, and there are some aspects of financial management that would be better off not locked up behind a username and password at a bank website. "We're building a business that's quite different than, hopefully, a lot of the other PFM players out there," Shergill said.
Whereas most PFM providers attract users by letting them import their own data from multiple banks, Bundle, which launched its service in January, did not even allow this feature until last month. Instead, it focused first on providing public access to its data for users to analyze and share. Daryl Otte, TheStreet.com's chief executive, said in a press release Monday that Bundle's focus on openly shared data fits with TheStreet.com's business model. "We firmly believe, as does Bundle, that personal finance spending and investing recommendations don't exist in a vacuum," Otte said in the press release. Representatives for TheStreet.com and Geezeo did not respond to inquiries Tuesday.
Cathy Graeber, founder of the consulting firm Swimming Upstream, said that although consumers have expressed their preference for viewing their financial data with banks, there is an opportunity for Bundle to attract them to its own site and that of its partners. "If banks and credit unions don't move faster to integrate financial management, consumers will go elsewhere," she said. By focusing on how Bundle's data can teach consumers how people are spending their money, TheStreet "starts them down a path of being smarter about tracking their spending," wherever they choose to track it, Graeber said.
Bundle is also backed by Microsoft Corp. and Morningstar Inc.
