Geezeo PFM: FS Vendor’s Product of the Week
Please give a short bio of your company
Founded in 2006, US-based Geezeo offers an integrated suite of Online Financial Management (OFM) tools and services including Personal Financial Management (PFM) software for banks and credit unions. Geezeo’s unique Engagement Banking platform helps financial institutions develop online customer dialog while generating growth through customer acquisition and increased wallet share. For more information on the privately held company, visit www.geezeo.com.
What is your product or service?
Primary product is Personal Financial Management (PFM). Geezeo also offers an online referral product called Referral Engine.
Please give a brief synopsis of the product/service
Our Personal Finance Management software provides a robust set of out-of-the-box solutions for almost any financial institution.
• Budgeting
• Account Aggregation
• Alerts
• Categorization Tagging
• Split Tagging
• Cash Flow
• Bill/Income Calendar
• Net Worth Calculator
• Goal Management & Tracking
• Expense Tracking
Why would a bank or credit union use your product/service?
Our primary focus is to provide services and technologies that enable our clients to activate their target audiences—to participate in sound financial decision-making, engage in community discussions, take advantage of relevant products and services, and create a more valuable customer experience. This increased activity has a straightforward result: our clients are able to better monetize their base and attract new relationships.
How could you effectively use this product/service?
Aside from enhancing a bank or credit unions online banking experience, Geezeo includes an integrated marketing platform. This provides an FI the ability to present targeted communications and marketing content directly to online account holders. A marketing platform can create segments based on demographic profile, types of financial accounts, and transaction data. Geezeo’s Integrated Marketing Platform 1.0 is included, at no additional cost, with Geezeo PFM.
Who is your competition, and what do you do better?
It is difficult to gauge our competition, as we are one of the only 100% white-label PFM providers on the market. Geezeo has taken great strides to work closely with large and small core processors to allow for easy, seamless integration.
Are there different pricing levels? Do you offer a free version?
Several pricing options are available to banks and credit unions.
When was the product/service officially launched?
Geezeo started in 2006 and moved to a white label model in 2009. The firm is 100% dedicated to serving the needs on retail financial institutions.
What is the number of current users? Estimated yearly growth?
Geezeo presently serves over 85 clients. We expect to have over 150 bank and credit union clients by EOY 2012.
What type of help support is offered?
Several levels of support are offered at the FI and end-user level.
What else is interesting about your product/service?
Geezeo Interactive, a division of Geezeo, offers services centered on the Geezeo mission of reinventing online banking experiences while leveraging PFM as a tipping point of an engagement banking strategy. Products and services support a FIs growth and retention strategy, with a particular emphasis on increasing PFM adoption. The organization will also work with clients to bridge the gap between online and offline experiences.
Looking For The Little Guy
When it comes to innovation in financial services, it always seems to be a small company that comes along and disrupts the industry. This can apply to technology, marketing, or any other area in financial services.
Occasionally your bigger companies will announce something that is game changing, but it doesn’t happen that often. Most of the time, it’s the small, nimble company that sees an opportunity and rushes in to fill that niche.
Years ago when I was working on a mobile banking project, I spent a lot of time looking for mobile banking vendors. After doing some research on the types of mobile banking being offered, I decided that text banking with alerts was the primary way to go.
At the time, the larger vendors, such as Jack Henry and Fiserv, only offered a mobile web solution. Through a lot of online searches and trade magazine reading, I found a few lesser known vendors. After a long vetting process, we finally decided on one of the lesser known vendors.
During my research, I remember thinking that it would be nice if there was one website I could go to and see all the vendors, big and small, for any particular product or service. Over time, I’ve found a few websites that list financial services vendors, and a few that even list some of their products. However, these websites primarily deal with larger technology companies and their products or just list company profiles for a number of categories.
What was missing was a website that also listed those innovative, smaller companies. Well, I feel iMazuma’s new service, FS Vendors, fills that niche.
FS Vendors is an online directory of financial services vendors that can be updated by any registered user. Users can update vendors’ profiles, their products, and also add reviews for their products. Products can be rated on intuitiveness, customer base, pricing, help support, security, openness, compatibility and vendor solvency.
Subscribing vendors are able to lock their profiles from editing and add links to white papers and other important links. Links to vendor news, which are updated throughout the day, can be found on the home page. FS Vendors also lists banks and credit unions (organizations) along with vendor products that they use.
It is my hope that you find FS Vendors to be a valuable resource in your vendor searches. Also, instead of always picking a product from your core vendor, you’ll be able to find and possibly work with great companies such as Currency Marketing, CU Wireless, Marquis Software Solutions, Geezeo, Aite Group, Garland Group and a multitude of others.
Sign up here to get started.
Software Patents Are the Devil
Watching the whole Mitek/USAA patent battle from the sidelines has been very disheartening. Just to be clear, I am firmly against software patents. This whole fight over mobile RDC just strengthens that resolve. What surprised me was that Mitek and USAA were apparently developing mobile RDC technology in a partnership.
Now, if actual code was taken without permission by either party, then I think it should be a copyright violation. As far as stealing algorithms and features? That’s just hogwash. I haven’t seen either one of their products but I bet I could write an iPhone app and backend that would handle RDC transactions. Would the features and algorithms be similar? You betcha.
Here is a part of Mitek’s claim against USAA:
On October 20, 2008, after Mitek emailed a USAA manager to describe new Mobile Deposit algorithms and features, the USAA manager responded by stating that he had been following Mitek’s progress, congratulated Mitek on that progress, and added that “Certainly Mitek is on the leading edge of this space and hopefully you will see some great adoption.”
Did you notice that said “describe new Mobile Deposit algorithms and feature”? That doesn’t mean code, pseudo-code, or even a flowchart was sent.
That email could very well have said:
“We have an iPhone app that uses the phone’s camera to snap a picture of a check. When the image is taken, our software automatically sharpens the image, encrypts it, and sends it to our MySQL database. No image is saved on the the phone. We also send a text alert back to the phone as confirmation.”
Now, I don’t even know if that’s the actual process, but I just gave you an algorithm and some features.
Part of the patent process involves the patent being for something that is non-obvious. If I see a camera phone and my job involves me looking into new banking technology, then mobile RDC is pretty obvious to me.
Once the iPhone SDK was released, a lot of possibilities became available. Given the number of RDC apps listed in the iTunes App Store, it seems that others are taking advantage of those possibilities.
There is also another issue in all this. USAA has a very competent technical staff. I’m sure there were some bright people that saw Mitek’s demo and said “hey, why get a vendor when we can do this ourselves?” I bet this happens a lot.
When I worked for a bank, we talked about the possibility of writing our own SMS mobile banking software after seeing demos by a few vendors. We certainly had staff members with enough technical chops to pull it off. However, the decision makers decided to go with a vendor solution and didn’t really look into developing mobile banking in-house.
Innovation is very important in our industry and it happens because we build on the work of others. The fact that a number of vendors sell variations of the same type of software is proof of that. If you asked me how many core processing vendors there were five years ago, I would have told you five.
Today, I know of over thirty vendors, and I’m sure there are a lot more. That’s because people at these companies felt that they could each do core processing in a better way. Their innovations give you better choices. Software patents limit innovation, which limits your choices.
The irony to this Mitek/USAA fight? If one or both used code that they found online (open source, code examples) then their patent claims could be voided. Also, neither of the companies was the first to launch mobile RDC, it was tiny WV United FCU.
Image from TechRights.org
