Yodlee Inc. has long offered products that keep track of and move money between accounts at multiple financial companies, but the vendor is pitching its latest software as a tool for creating an entire online banking service.
Though the basic concept of account aggregation is not new, Yodlee hopes banks will use its new software, MoneyCenter, to create a unified banking service. The Redwood City, Calif., vendor's OnCenter is used to create an aggregation page as part of a bank's Web site.
"Consumers are saying, 'Help me go beyond looking at my balances and paying bills online,' " said Anil Arora, Yodlee's president and chief executive. "We did a lot of research."
Though many banks offer aggregation services, the Web pages can be hard to find, and the data from accounts at other financial companies, such as an online brokerage, may be limited to balances and the most recent transactions.
Mr. Arora said that MoneyCenter, which will go live July 4, will let banks completely revamp their online banking sites to include data from the bank and from other companies on the same screen. As result, he said, it will be easier for customers to see all their holdings, move money back and forth, and view and pay bills.
MoneyCenter can display any information that is available online at sites from which Yodlee is permitted to gather data. It can subtract debts from assets to calculate a consumer's net worth, and it can remind people when bills are due.
The software also creates a combined register of credits and debits for all accounts as though they were on the same statement. It can project earning and spending and advise consumers to transfer money if an upcoming bill payment would leave an account with a negative balance.
Much like personal financial management software such as Intuit Inc.'s Quicken, or Microsoft Corp.'s Money, the Yodlee software can track spending habits and show people how much they spend overall for various categories, from any account.
It also includes a search function for users to find specific transactions.
For credit cards, it can include reward balances alongside the spending history.
Yodlee says it expects to have MoneyCenter running at two or three banks by yearend, and Mr. Arora said that it will help people keep track of their financial habits.
Aggregation is "an enabler," he said. "It's in the background."
In the banking industry, aggregation has had mixed results. Some companies, such as Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup Inc., offered aggregation services for a while but eventually dropped them from their Web sites.
Others, like Wachovia Corp., have been more enthusiastic about the technology, but they have also said it is hard to justify the business case for making it easier for customers to send money to other companies.
Wells, Citi, and Wachovia are or were Yodlee customers.
"The only way aggregation can survive is really … as something integrated into the online banking experience, not as a separate module," said Gwenn Bezard, a research director at Aite Group LLC of Boston.
Since switching online banking providers is "a major decision," Mr. Bezard said, he expects most of the interest in Yodlee's software to come from insurance companies and brokerages: "new entrants to the online banking space."
