Wesabe: MySpace For Your Checkbook
The transformational power of Web 2.0 never ceases to amaze.
YouTube King Hurley’s recent DC stop at Capitol Hill saw him being feted for “helping children in Africa,” thanks to YouTube’s clip-culture. Today, Union Square Ventures advises that its new financial services portfolio company–Wesabe–can help solve the world’s loneliness, really.
What is Wesabe? Who are the entrepreneurs behind it?
First off, the team behind the Web-based financial planning tool assures:
We are not a team of financial planners or number crunchers.
How refreshing? For a site that wants to help people plan their finances? No fear, the service claims that by pooling everyone’s (non) knowledge, all will be more financially savvy.
Union Square Ventures buys it, literally, as the lead in a $4 million Series A funding round. In justifying its investment, partner Brad Burnham waxes poetic on why Wesabe is “more than a personal financial service”:
Balancing your checkbook using desktop software is a lonely pursuit. You may feel better knowing where your money went, and even have some idea about how you did against your budget, but you haven’t learned much more than that. Your relationship with your software is defined. It is a utility. Its value is limited. The best it can do is save you a little time each month when you plow through an unhappy chore.
On the web it can be a whole different story. If you manage your expenses on a web based service you have the opportunity to contribute to community and to take advantage of its collective wisdom. Allowing your service provider to aggregate transaction data anonymously makes it possible for that provider to deliver a service that is better than desktop software.
Share and share alike? With W2s?
“Using a web based financial services provider makes the notion of personal financial services less personal and more communal,” hails Burnham. The Wesabe Website touts “managing your money in public view” and the wistfull “When does money buy happiness?”
Not all is so touch feely at Wesabe, though. After all, money is at the heart of the “community”. Burnham is on the “Peer produced data categorization and cleansing” bandwagon:
I have given up using my annual gold card statement from American Express, because half of the vendors are listed as an unrecognizable string of characters, and even when they get the vendor right, they often do not put that vendor in the right category. Once I contribute my data to a co-op, a lot of these things are fixed much more easily. If anyone participating in the community recognizes an incomprehensible string of characters as “Whole Foods” and makes the change in their account, everyone in the community benefits from their contribution. After three or four people do it, the service provider can begin making the change. If most people categorize expenses in certain ways, the service provider can usefully suggest categories, and auto-fill entries to speed you on your way.
So let the peer produced data categorization and cleansing begin? Social personal finance sounds a lot more appealing.
Wesabe has all star Web names behind it: Cory Doctorow, Clay Shirky. The power advisiory board has undoubtedly helped garner the accolades Wesabe has already received, even though the Wesabe Website gives the appearance of not even being open for “business.”
Online Banking Report gushes: “Wesabe is a company you want to love. They are on a mission to bring clarity to the mess most people make of their personal finances.”
Financial blind leading the financial blind?
Moreover, the notion of consumers falling in love with one’s checkbook, and a Web services company to boot, does not appear to be grounded in hard, metrics driven research, or even soft focus group targeting.
The story of Wesabe and Union Square Ventures may be a love story though, love for Web 2.0 hype.