Balancion To Help You With Your Personal Finance
Balancion, is a new Finnish startup that will help you see the complete picture of your personal finance. At the moment, the service is in closed alpha and very little is known of it. Jussi Muurikainen, the CEO and founder of the company has posted a long message into Balancion's Facebook page to tell a little about the service.
In the message Muurikainen outlines the basis on which the company was founded and what its goals are. The idea for the service has grown from his personal frustration to understand one's financial situation (income, expenses and the distribution there in). He, like I, use an excel sheet to keep count of your personal expenses and through that try to understand where your money is going and where you're getting it. It is usable in my opinion, but there are better network externalities in doing this online. Speaking from this perspective, I can say that this is a service I'm looking forwards to using.
Like I mentioned above, the service at the moment is in closed alpha meaning that the basic service itself is ready but still being tested and used by the developers themselves. The service has been developed by Idean Enterprises. Muurikainen also states that he conducted a research with IRO Research to determine the need for such a service in late 2008. Regarding the finance he states that the concept was already back then in such a shape that enough public and private funding was gathered for the project to go ahead. No distinctive sources are named for the private funding.
At the moment the service is only in Finnish and it seems that there are no plans for now to make it international. I'm assuming the prototyping and development will be done in co-operation with the Finnish beta users. According to Balancion's Facebook page, they are launching the closed beta September 15th.
One interesting change that Balancion might be able to make happen regarding the Finnish bank system is the opening of its data to third party services. Muurikainen has not given any statements on this yet, but hints into that direction in conversation in the Facebook Fan page. One of the commenters to his "3 most important features" -post stated that no users will adopt the service unless financial data will freely and automatically flow from the banks into the system and to this Muurikainen stated that take this as given "for now". If this really means what it probably does - the service is going to become huge as it will be the first to take advantage of the huge data the Finnish banks are sitting on. In other countries, US for example, banks have been giving up their data to third party services for quite a while already (despite us calling them backwards for using cheques!).
So all in all, a very functional service and if done correctly - a very useful one for many. I personally look to see some degree of social integration among users in a way Mint.com does for example. Furthermore, I'm looking forwards to the business model of the service but I'm guessing it's a freemium one.
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This sounds a lot like Yunoo (http://www.yunoo.nl/), a Dutch startup (in beta) that helps you import bank statements from all your bank accounts etc, and then lets you analyze where your money goes. They call it the 'social personal finance platform'.
Ton, yes very much like that. I have no idea on the integration between banks and the service yet though.
There are numerous examples of this sort of services out there, Mint.com being perhaps the most known one.
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Don't know about other (Finnish) banks, but Ålandsbanken offers simple yet effective association of transactions to categories. So both in- and outgoing money can be allocated to any "label", for example "health care", "clothing", etc. It can also persistently associate a recipient (or sender) to a label so that it automatically labels e.g. transactions at your local food store to "food".
I personally like this system so much that I actually pay more often with my bank card than I otherwise would.
The one thing missing is credit card transactions, which in one way is understandable and in another way isn't.
Of course with any such system cash payments are "doomed" ;)
And FWIW: early U.S. based services (and desktop software) actually used "screen scraping" as the method to import data from banks. Hopefully, banks are actually now providing documented, secure, and stable interfaces.
You can get CSV data from some of the banks and my guess is that this is how Balancion will operate.
To my understanding Balancion will be a for-pay service from the get go ie. not a freemium model.
Secondly, they didn't have contracts with Finnish banks to export the data a couple of weeks ago, but they were working on that. That said, they do have a 'manual' system to get the data out, which could be much like what Karri is suggesting.
As it happens I am on the board of Balancion, and just blogged about it here:
http://tane.li/2009/joined-balancion-board
I think there's plenty of inherit and implied demand for services like this - people do need them.
Finnish banks of course have well-established and standardized ways for statement data download and payment instruction upload. The only problem is that APIs are targeted at corporates and you need a visit to your branch for the necessary access keys. For the adoption of Balancion and other similar services this is too big a barrier (not to mention the API's limited or non-existent availability to consumers).
That is not to say that the banks could not assign sort of developer API keys to a service like Balancion. To access the customer's account statement they would need to request permission using an OAuth like process where the consumer is authenticated using the normal bank online banking access codes. In many ways this would be a far superior solution to the methods available for OFX statement download in the US where the consumer needs to share their username/password (no single use passwords) with the service provider. But then again, this has not apparently slowed down too much the adoption of the likes of Mint and Wesabe.
Tuomas,
Thanks for the very informative insight. Fascinating area with big challenges but equally big opportunities.
Hi guys,
Thanks for Your interest in our great service mission; to draw the big picture of our customers finances. We´ll do something quite different in a quite stagnant market and being quite unique also in the playground of other online money management services available in the US...and perhaps that´s what people are waiting for. We´ll see. I´m glad to introduce the service itself after the big day of our launch...
Jussi Muurikainen,
Founder & CEO
Balancion Oy
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