I’ve been holding off on writing about Wesabe, just to give sometime for the service/platform/network to take hold. For those who don’t know or keep their money in mattresses, Wesabe does for finance, what LinkedIn does for looking for a job: allows you to announce, share and track your goals and interests with others.

In addition to the social aspects of the platform, Wesabe also provides an aggregation engine that grabs your financial data from your various institutions and pulls it into your Wesabe profile. Aggregation is a Web 1.0 term that recalls names like Yodlee and Chaabi and other screen scrape specialists. It is enjoying a bit of a resurgence with CommerceBank acquiring eMoneyadvisor and Nextgen bank sites getting up.  There are two quite notable aspects to Wesabe’s approach to transaction data:

1. Interesting use of a web-enabled application that simply automates the login and download (and subsequent upload to Wesabe) of a statement on a periodic basis. Aggregations big issue back in the day and what we thought we solved with screen scraping was that pulling secure data from a banks server was a task that could not be performed on the “server-side”. This is not server side either but the effect is pleasant and more importantly transparent to the user.
2. Intelligence on the data pulled from your bank. Unlike the early aggregators, this is not about create “one site” or a portal for your financial data. You can actually due things with your info that you cannot do on your bank site. Useful things like tag recurring transactions that come up with a foggy MCC code and poorly tagged merchant like STARBU–ACH-399PA. That’s my Starbucks which is on Lexington Avenue and 53rd. In Wesabe, it’s called simply MORNING STARBUCKS. Then I can see how much or little I spend on caffeine.

Word on the web is that the Wesabe folks are bootstrapping and running lean at 4 or 5 heads. Which is a brilliant example of how you can take a banks information at actually make it interesting and useful without much investment, just a smart approach.

I’ll be tracking them as the community grows, as the value of social finance is driven directly by who joins and gets active.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 12.03am and is filed under 2.0, social computing, banking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.