Wheaties for Your Wallet

Good reading for March 3rd:

• Nation & World | Consumers fight rising use of hidden fees | Seattle Times Newspaper - “For years, consumers ignored [fees] because they were relatively small and weren’t worth the hassle to fight. But multiply those small amounts by millions of customers and they become a multibillion-dollar corporate windfall.”
• Banking Fees Are Rising And Often Undisclosed - washingtonpost.com - “Banks are failing to provide consumers with information about fees on savings and checking accounts even though federal rules require such disclosures, according to a government report to be released tomorrow.”
• More Americans using credit cards to stay afloat - USATODAY.com - “Seven years in the credit-counseling business didn’t prepare Ann Estes for the alarming trend she began noticing last fall: As her clients’ mortgage bills became unaffordable, a growing number of them began paying their credit card bills before — and sometimes instead of — their mortgages.”
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich — Announcing the 2008 Tax Makeover Guide - “Today, I’m announcing a new eBook that covers all the basics of taxes. It’s called the 2008 Tax Makeover Guide.” Good timing…
• Tactics for the Frustrated Consumer (SmartMoney Magazine) | SmartMoney.com - “Consumers have had a lot to complain about these days. But where exactly do you go to get satisfaction? We looked at some tactics for the frustrated to employ.”

Good reading for February 28th:

• Demand Satisfaction! — Video: Panel, “Scaling Customer Service” - “At the Customer Service is the New Marketing summit, we had an excellent panel on the subject of ‘Scaling Customer Service,’ … moderated by Marc Hedlund of Wesabe.” — I had fun at this panel, lots of good info from the panelists.
• Bank of America, HSBC Most Prone to I.D. Theft, Report Says | Threat Level from Wired.com - “In a first ever study of which companies have the most identity theft incidents, Bank of America, HSBC, and Washington Mutual were named as the companies with the most incidents per billions of dollars of deposits…”
• When credit cards put you in jeopardy - CNN.com - “Consumers have racked up more than $2.2 trillion in purchases and cash advances on major credit cards in just the last year.”
• Exposing the Credit-Card Fine Print - TIME - “To credit-card companies, it’s not sufficient that customers pay their bills on time every month; they must also avoid a daunting array of borrowing habits that lenders deem risky. Like borrowing.”
• Want a better credit card rate? Just ask - The Red Tape Chronicles - MSNBC.com - “If interest rates are going down, why are credit card rates going up?” Bob’s blog (and his new book) are both great and well worth your time.

Good reading for February 12th:

• Why sadness can blow your budget - CNN.com - “If you’re sad and shopping, watch your wallet: A new study shows people’s spending judgment goes out the window when they’re down, especially if they’re a bit self-absorbed.” I think this happens to almost everyone (he says self-absorbedly…).
• Scanning Your Money to the Bank - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - “Soon you will be able to deposit checks by scanning them at home and sending them electronically to your bank. No need to visit a branch or even an ATM.” (More on CheckFree’s offering)
• Economy Fitful, Americans Start to Pay as They Go - New York Times - “With the number of jobs shrinking, housing prices falling and debt levels swelling, the same nation that pioneered the no-money-down mortgage suddenly confronts an unfamiliar imperative: more Americans must live within their means.”
• Paper or Plastic? - washingtonpost.com - Looks like the right answer is “neither.”
• FindABetterBank launched - “We launched FindABetterBank last Friday and we’ve already crossed the 1,000 visitors mark.” Congrats, guys!
• CheckFree to Enable In-home Remote Check Deposits for Consumers and Small Businesses (NetBanker) - “CheckFree aims to change that with a new service targeted to consumers and very small businesses (press release here). The key is using existing consumer scanners and multi-function printers.” Cool.
• Tracking Consumer Savings on eBay - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - “Writing in an coming issue of Information Systems Research, the researchers report that eBay buyers saved more than $7 billion in 2003 and $8.4 billion in 2004. Extrapolating from their data, they project that consumers saved $19 billion on eBay last year.”
• Put Buyers First? What a Concept - New York Times - “My Christmas story — the one I’ve been telling and retelling these last 10 days — began on Friday, Dec. 21.” (Oldie but a goodie.)

Wesabe has had a huge influx of new members over the past few months, each month bringing more (and more and more!) than the last. It’s been great, and we love seeing the site bring so many people together, but we haven’t been able to get back to people with support requests as quickly as we, or you, would like.

As a result, I’m especially happy to welcome Nate to Wesabe, joining us as a member advocate. He’ll be replying to support emails and Groups posts along with Paul and the rest of the Wesabe development group. Welcome, Nate!

As always, we are hiring, and we’re very interested in developers, designers, systems administrators, security engineers, and community advocates who find what we’re doing compelling. You can read more about our development approach here, our privacy approach here, and the main reason this is a great place to work here. If you’d like to join us and help make Wesabe better, drop us a line at “oneofus at wesabe dot com” and tell us what one thing you most want to change about the site, and why you’re the right person to make that change. We’d love to hear from you.

About a year ago, we got a request from a Wesabe user that asked,

Hey, Wesabe is great, and your Uploader is one of the main reasons I joined — asking me to put my bank password into some new web site in order to even try it would have been nuts. But now I’ve been using it for a while, and I trust you. Do you plan to make some way for me to use Wesabe and get automatic updates without having to run the Uploader all the time?

(Another Wesabean was more blunt: “I’m glad you didn’t ask for my passwords on the first date. But now that we’ve been going out for a while….” — well, you get the idea.)

Over the year, we’ve heard the same thing from many people. They started with Wesabe because they believe we care a huge amount about securing their data (and we do). They liked that we provided choices for making their uploads automatic. But after a while, they had come to trust us and believe in our mission, and now they wanted something more convenient from us.

Today, we’re answering that request. We’ve just launched an invitation-only preview to our “Automatic Uploader,” which provides fully automatic updates to your Wesabe accounts, and which does not require you to install any software or downloads from us. If you’re interested in giving it a try, head over to preview.wesabe.com and sign up for an invitation. Today we support fully automatic updates for more than 75% of the accounts on our site, and we plan to launch with about 90% — and since we support more banks and credit cards than other sites, that adds up to a great level of coverage. We’re rolling this out a bit at a time to allow us to scale it up smoothly, and to work out any errors downloading accounts before a general launch.

We believe that it is a huge strength of Wesabe that we offer you choices about how you want to manage your data, and control over your data — moreso than any other company. As part of that, we are continuing to support our Desktop, Firefox, and Manual Uploaders, which give you this benefit, and we will continue to support them as long as people ask us to. But we also want to be the most convenient site, and to do that, we think this is a great step.

In the process of building the Automatic Uploader, we’ve done a bunch of interesting and, we think, innovative security work to make our setup for this as good as it can be — extending our “Super Ninja Privacy Techniques” to this part of the application, too. I’ve written before about why we think that outsourcing data upload to third party companies is terrible for users, and prevents us from giving you the control over your data that we think is critical. This is a great example of what owning the whole process allows us to do: pass on our security benefits to you and make sure we don’t give up any control for you. We’re going to be publishing the methods we’ve developed to make this work once the feature goes into general release.

I’m excited about this launch. We believe in removing any barrier to Wesabe being the best, easiest to use, and most helpful site out there, and I think today we’ve taken another big step out ahead of that. Head over to preview.wesabe.com and let us know what you think.

I opened an HSBC Direct savings account with a 4.50% APR interest rate about a month ago. On January 29th, I got an email from HSBC Direct announcing an interest rate change for my account:

We are writing to inform you that based on the recent drop by the Federal Reserve, HSBC Direct has adjusted your Online Savings Account rate to 3.80% APY. At 8x the national savings average, you are still earning one of America’s highest savings rates.

Today, I got another email:

We are writing to inform you that based on the recent drop by the Federal Reserve, HSBC Direct has adjusted your Online Savings Account rate to 3.55% APY. At 8x the national savings average, you are still earning one of America’s highest savings rates.

Oof! Nearly a full point drop — and I just opened the account a month ago.

Looks like ING Direct is advertising 3.40%, and Emigrant Direct is still up at 4.05%. Wonder how long that will last…

Wesabean Tommy Vernieri has created an excellent Google Code project, providing an Excel spreadsheet that lets you download your transactions from Wesabe and create a budget for them. He calls it Budgeting for Wesabe using Excel, and it’s a neat piece of work. Tommy’s spreadsheet uses the Wesabe API to fetch your transactions, and then lays them out to make budgeting easy. He’s also provided tools for updating your transactions in the spreadsheet.

You don’t have to know anything but your Wesabe credentials to use the spreadsheet, but if you’re a VBScript programmer, he also provides a set of methods for interacting with the Wesabe API. These would be great for building your own spreadsheet using the API.

Thanks much for building this great project, Tommy, and for sharing it with us!

P.S.: Tommy is a wine fan and wanted to let people know that, “If you’ve never watched Wine Library TV <http://winelibrarytv.com> you should check it out, it’s a lot of fun. The 400th episode is running on Monday…”

(Note: Wesabe does not endorse or review any third-party API clients — use at your own risk.)

Jason and I are speaking at a couple of great events this week.

Tomorrow (Monday), I’m speaking at the “Customer Service is the New Marketing” summit, hosted by our friends at Get Satisfaction. We love love love the Satisfaction site and I’m thrilled to be speaking at the conference. I’ll be moderating a panel called “Scaling Customer Service” with Heather Champ, Community Manager from Flickr, Frederick Mendler, Vice President, Fanatical Support from Rackspace, Pratap Penumalli, Consumer Operations Manager from Google, and Ross Mayfield, Founder and President from Socialtext. It should be a great event.

Wednesday, Jason is speaking at the Money:Tech conference in New York. He’ll be presenting an overview of the personal finance space and how Wesabe and its competitors are reshaping a long-established market. We also have a special surprise lined up for the conference, which I think many of you will like a great deal.

If you’re attending either event, please come up and introduce yourself, and tell us the one thing we could improve about Wesabe that would make it better for you. Hope to see you there.

We’ve launched another great new feature tonight: if your bank or credit card isn’t listed as supported in Wesabe, you can add it yourself in under a minute. Why wait months for someone else to decide if they want to help you with your money or not, when you can be up and running in minutes?

We have always tried to be as inclusive as possible in listing every bank, credit union, and credit card, anywhere in the world, and we already have about 5,000 banks and credit cards around the world supported within our system — more than other sites, in most cases thousands more. The only requirement we have is that they provide one of the export formats we support (currently OFX, a.k.a. “MS Money,” QFX, a.k.a. “Quicken”, QIF, or OFC). We also make automatic downloads available to more people than ever before, using our Firefox Uploader, for the banks that support one of those formats. On top of that, we provide automatic currency conversion for all of the world’s major currencies — now over 180 currencies total.

But, there are still plenty of banks, credit unions, and credit cards around the world that we don’t yet list — either we don’t know about them or we just haven’t gotten to adding them yet. For new users, this means that they have had to write to our support line, and wait for us to add their bank. Often we do that in under one business day, but that’s still too long of a wait.

Now, that wait is gone. Simply by filling out a three-question setup form, any bank that supports one of our import formats can be added immediately.

For security reasons, a bank you add is only visible to you until we review and approve it. But, you can use it right away with either manual upload on the site, or in the Firefox Uploader.

I’ve talked before about why we’ve built our own data import system, rather than contracting out to a third-party data middleman service. One of the reasons I always mention is that building our own system allows us to control the results, and give you more control over your own data and experience by extension. This is another example of how owning that system allows us to provide you with better support — unlike other sites, we don’t have to pay anyone to add a new financial institution, nor do we have to outsource an update development process in order to laboriously add that support. In under a minute, you can add your own bank to Wesabe, and for almost any bank out there, you can automate your uploads with just a few clicks. No waiting. Full convenience.

We’re putting the finishing touches on some more new features that take even greater advantage of the data import system we’ve built. I’ll admit that building from the ground up has meant we’ve had some construction noise from time to time. But now that the foundation is solid and the walls are rising, you’ll find that Wesabe gives you the most control over your financial data, and the best choices for handling your private credentials so that you’re comfortable and secure. We can give you the best experience because we own it top to bottom, and we love seeing that pay off for you. I hope this helps.

Good reading for January 11th:

• FBI wiretaps dropped due to unpaid bills - Yahoo! News - “Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.” Glad to hear they don’t discriminate.
• Technology Review: Second Life Closes Banks - …this week, Linden Lab abruptly banned virtual banks that can’t furnish “proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter.” The requirement appears likely to shut down all of Second Life’s banks.
• BusinessWeek: Delinquency Rates On the Rise - After a gloomy holiday season hobbled by rising unemployment and fears of a recession, the bad news just keeps coming for cash-strapped consumers. Rates of delinquency for credit-card holders rose in November…
• Fresh Air: Fees, Cheats and ‘Gotcha Capitalism’ - [Bob] Sullivan’s latest book is about the hidden fees found in many phone, cable, credit card and other bills. All told, he says, corporations are nickel-and-diming their customers to death — or at least to the tune of $1,000 or more a year.
• The 15 most rewarding credit cards - MSN Money - The thrill of a credit card rewards program is so fleeting. Yes, it’s wonderful to get free stuff — travel, cash back, money for college — just by using your credit card. But with so many rewards programs out there, it’s hard not to second-guess your choice.
• Conveniently Reduce Energy Consumption With Belkinâ��s Conserve Surge Protector - “The new Belkin Conserve is an 8-outlet surge protector that makes it simple to eliminate wasteful standby power to your electronic devices…” Nice!
• F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Winding Up True Green - New York Times - Corporations and shoppers in the United States spent more than $54 million last year on carbon offset credits … But where exactly is that money going?