Wells Fargo recently dropped their OneLook service, and its interesting (speculation on my part) that Yodlee have been busy with announcements recently, and whether Wells are doing something with them.

Anyhow, Yodlee are busy, first was the account opening, including funding announcement, and now the personal finance centre.

San Francisco Business Times: Yodlee to debut personal finance service this summer – 2006-04-13

Yodlee, the Redwood City firm originally founded as an online account aggregation service, will debut its Money Center personal finance service this summer. The service will be offered through major banks. It's expected to be a free service, at least initially, to bank customers since most financial institutions see better customer retention and lower costs of servicing online banking customers.

Yodlee have been successful in lining themselves up as a capability for Banks, and not a competitor.

Yodlee CEO Anil Arora told the Business Times that he expects Money
Center, a web-based service, to gain better traction in the marketplace
than personal finance software offerings like Intuit's (NASDAQ: INTU) Quicken has experienced.

Additionally the concept of online account opening is plagued by the problem that its just too hard. From personal experience in this space, I can attest that its easy to get people to open accounts online, but really hard to get them to move to your bank, which is actually what you want to happen.

"The reality is that opening an account online today is not easy, and
nearly 70 percent of accounts opened online never get funded," said
Peter Hazlehurst, senior vice president of product development at
Yodlee. "We realized in looking at the problem that our technology
could dramatically simplify the process and reduce risk."

Finally, Prosper keep showing up in these evolutions. One to watch!

San Francisco startup Prosper Marketplace Inc. is said to be turning to Yodlee to simplify the process of opening an account at the online person-to-person lending service.

Relevance to Bankwatch:

Online account opening will become a core account acquisition method in the future, and banks should watch this development closely.

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