Geezeo Tools Can Blend Mobile Rewards with Financial Management

Mobile offers and personal financial management are different technologies that make the same promise: if a bank offers them, the consumers who use them will consider that bank's product their top-of-wallet account. 

Like combining chocolate and peanut butter, the financial technology vendor Geezeo is providing the tools to mix these two systems into a product that it says can be more enjoyable than using each ingredient separately.

Banks "could have the aggregated data [from personal financial management] in the mobile device that's powering offers beyond just the [primary] debit card," says Peter Glyman, president and co-founder of Geezeo.

Personal financial management, or PFM, takes aggregated data from multiple bank accounts and presents it all in one clean view to help consumers set budgets and savings goals across multiple accounts. The transaction data is often presented as bar charts or pie charts to make it easier to read.

Geezeo does not make a mobile offer system. Instead, it plans to announce an application programming interface, or API, to make it easier to link its PFM technology to a mobile banking app. This way, banks could seamlessly combine their mobile offer systems with PFM, rather than build a separate app for each.

Adding PFM can boost the effectiveness of a mobile offer system, Glyman says.

"When you start using a real-time API, you can actually start doing things like recall real-time categorizations on transactions," he says. For pure PFM, this allows users to know right away if they've exceeded a particular budget. For mobile offers, this allows data from multiple accounts to be used to generate new offers.

"Getting into transactional-level detail [at the] point of sale, you can start getting immediate feedback" that can inform offers and other financial decisions, Glyman says.

Mobile-offer systems already look at transaction details from users' accounts to provide rewards in real time or to use past spending to generate future offers. The systems are often considered a selling point of mobile wallets; when Google launched its Google Wallet last year, it announced the mobile wallet side-by-side with its new Google Offers system.

By offering an API, Geezeo enables smaller mobile-software developers to do things with its technology that Geezeo could not normally accommodate.

"We're not a custom dev shop," Glyman says. "We don't change our code. The API, in a sense, lets them create their own experiences using our architecture and backbone."

Movenbank, which plans to provide financial services primarily through mobile banking, works with Geezeo's technology. Glyman says this is one example of how financial institutions can design new things with his company's software.

"[Movenbank] is all mobile," he says. "They're cardless. They're going to market with a mobile product."

Geezeo is not alone in trying to combine its technology with mobile offers. Intuit's Mint.com has a mobile app that pulls in data from multiple accounts to help consumers decide whether to switch their bank accounts to products offered by Mint's partners and advertisers.

When Intuit designed Mint's iPad app, it used the device's larger screen to make it easier for families to consider such changes together, compared to the mobile phone which is a more personal device.