Finovate2009, an event centered around the future of finance, is on today in New York City so expect a couple of interesting announcements from the online money management industry this morning and later this week. We had previously covered Billshrink’s new offering and Outright.com opening up its beta to the public.
Later today, content recommendation and discovery software builder Strands will announce that its personal finance subsidiary moneyStrands has teamed up with Savings.com to bring personalized online coupon recommendations to the company’s personal budgeting & online money management platform.
Thanks to this partnership, moneyStrands users will now see a new widget dubbed “Special Offers” in the web app (under the “Just for Me” tab), which will display a number of personalized online coupons from a variety of stores and brands, recommended to each user based on his or her spending pattern as recorded on moneyStrands.
Bringing web deals to a place where people manage their personal finances seems like a solid idea to me – particularly in a recession – so I’m surprised to note Strands is actually the first to incorporate custom coupons into a money management app. If its recommendation technology works as advertised and the feature gets noticed sufficiently by its users, this could be a beneficial partnership for both companies and a precursor to similar deals with similar service providers like Mint, Wesabe and the likes.
To refresh your memory: moneyStrands was born out of Strands’ acquisitions of both Expensr and NetworthIQ back in May 2008. Savings.com has been around a bit longer: it was founded in 2004 and currently breaks about $10 million in revenues according to Mahalo CEO (and TechCrunch50 co-host) Jason Calacanis, who joined the Santa Monica, CA-based company’s board earlier this Summer.
looks nice, never used it, but love mint and wesabe. Does it have the same beautiful UI?
http://uploadro...ts.com/godly_ui
it’s too bad mint only works for americans. Like um, most of the online content *kuch* hulu *kuch*. Maybe if you techcrunch people could let us know with erhm, something like a “Europe Approved” seal
I’m sorry, but what is “*kuch* hulu *kuch*”?
For me moneystrands works great! Manual accounts are allowed, it’s faster and have better analysis tools.
It appears that they are also using the Ruby language, based on the .action extension of the signup url, just like mint.com, imho.
Now if only they could download my account data from mint.com rather than straight from my bank, that could be awesome. The fewer sites that have my bank web login information, the better. Perhaps a startup could specialize in re-publishing this data, sort of like a paypal does for credit cards or openid for identities.
btw, to any entrepreneurs out there, yodlee provides the data to mint.com
Yodlee actually provides most of the banking APIs too
A url that ends with .action is typically a Java application not Ruby or Rails.
As the CTO and Co-Founder of a similar offer for Small Businesses and Freelancers, I agree. We would love to be able to get read access to bank transactions without dealing with screen scraping or DirectConnect. I really wish Banks would supply OAuth so we wouldn’t have to collect bank account credentials and allow our customers control over who can securely access their data.
savings.com raised $6M funding? How do they spend it? I never though a deal website needs that much money to build.