The following guest post is written by Larry Chiang, a co-founder of Duck9 who also regularly blogs for BusinessWeek. Today he is reporting from the Finovate startup conference.
At the FinovateStartup conference in New York City today, it is clear that financial startups are pushing forward regardless of funding woes or a lackluster economy
Companies here at Finovate center around financial innovations. They track personal finance and are aggressively plodding forward because consumer adoption of the internet is rising. These companies did not just present ideas, they brought along established industry stalwarts to their demos. What’s more, many of these start-ups are already white labeling their product and integrating into established company sites (T-Mobile ads, Yahoo, Bank of America). The user interfaces are better than average, which is perhaps influenced by Finovate’s previous winner Mint.
Best in Show went to Kasasa, an Austin, Texas-based financial website that uses real-world rewards and charity donations to get people to open free deposit accounts.
We all like the idea of setting aside a nice chunk of money in a savings account and putting it to work for us, but it’s a bit easier said than done — if you want the best rates, you have to choose from one of hundreds of CDs and savings account products offered by various banks, each of which has its own rates and restrictions. BillShrink, the startup that targets a variety of verticals to help users save money, is launching a new service today that looks to help make this decision much easier.
If you’ve used any of BillShrink’s other services before — which include cost cutters for cell phone plans, gas stations, and credit cards — you’ll be right at home here. To get started, BillShrink asks you where you’re currently keeping your money, as well as the amount that’s in your account.
Last night we reported that BillShrink, a scrappy startup that helps users lower common household bills, scored a major marketing deal: T-Mobile is promoting them in shops and via a national television commercial in a huge way.
T-Mobile urges people to have a “mobile makeover” to “find a wireless plan that has the best coverage and price for you – even if it’s not with us.” The advertising goes on: “We’ll send you to BillShrink.com, an independent, third-party website that evaluates all of your unique needs against every national wireless plan.”
Sounds awesome. Kudos to T-Mobile for promoting an independent site. And +1 to BillShrink for convincing them to put serious marketing dollars towards promoting BillShrink.com.
…just one problem. The BillShrink tool that analyzes a user’s mobile usage to find the right plan for them says that a T-Mobile plan is almost always the right choice.
T-Mobile USA announced today a new campaign dedicated to helping people save money on their wireless service, and the carrier is not only using the lovely Catherine Zeta-Jones as the face of the campaign again, they’re also giving a huge vote of confidence and a heap of exposure to Redwood City, CA-based startup BillShrink.
People can now visit the T-Mobile website or one of its retail stores for a so-called “Mobile Makeover”: free, unbiased and personalized savings recommendations for wireless plans, powered by BillShrink.
Most drivers are familiar with the never-ending dance that goes on at the gasoline pump, where fuel can fluctuate in price multiple times a day. But despite our constant grumbling, unless two stations are side-by-side, few of us go to the effort to actually find the cheapest gas around.
Now BillShrink, a startup that offers a variety of comparison engines designed to help users save as much money as possible, is looking to help you find the cheapest gas in your area, without forcing you to drive miles out of your way.
To get started, BillShrink initially asks for your home address and your most-visited destination, the make of your car, and how much gas you typically fill up when you visit a station. It plots your most commonly driven route on a map, locating nearby gas stations along the route and pulling data from partner services to get the latest gas prices from each station. It then looks at how far out of the way each station is, analyzing how much gasoline would be used in order to drive to a cheaper station and determining if the cost savings would be worth the trouble. You can also filter gas stations by the amenities offered (for example, if you wanted to make sure that the location you were visiting accepted credit cards or had a convenience store). After the initial setup, the service will monitor price fluctations on a daily basis, and you can elect to receive regular updates notifying when your ideal gas station switches.
BillShrink, a startup that aims to help users save money across a variety of vertical markets, has closed an $8 million Series B funding round led by Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. The round brings BillShrink’s total funding to around $9 million, after a $1 million Series A round last year.
As part of the deal Trinity’s Gus Tai will join BillShrink’s board of directors, which also includes David Cowan (founder of VeriSign) and Matt Coffin (founder of LowerMyBills). Cowan recently launched Bessemer-incubated startup MashLogic.
BillShrink originally launched in April as a service for saving costs on mobile phone bills. In September the site expanded to helping users identify their ideal credit card. BillShrink says it will use the new funding to continue expanding into new verticals. Despite the woes facing the startup world as a whole, BillShrink seems to be positioning itself well – in the current economic climate the company shouldn’t have any problem finding users looking to save some cash.
BillShrink, the startup that helps users cut costs on their phone bills, is expanding its automated advisor to an entirely new field: Credit Cards. The site’s recommendation engine will now include a database of over 200 major credit cards, helping users choose an ideal card after entering only a few basic criteria.
To begin using the system, users first decide if they’re interested in a card that will reward them for keeping their bills paid off, or one that will minimize the interest accrued on balances that are being paid off over time. Next, they’re asked to enter the amount of money the typically spend in a month, their current credit standing, and the places they spend the most money (for example, “groceries” or “airline tickets”).
Billshrink, the new startup that aspires to simplify the often painful process of choosing and comparing mobile plans (and eventually other services), has launched in beta. While promising, it still needs a lot of work.
The site offers an ostensibly impressive feature-set. Upon entering a cell number and the password associated with a mobile account, the user is presented with a comprehensive usage analysis, including a listing of the user’s most-called contacts and networks. Those wary of sharing their personal information can manually enter data such as “minutes used”, though this is a somewhat more tedious process. Data is compiled and analyzed, at which point a list of comparable (and hopefully less expensive) plans is presented.
Billshrink also offers maps with visual representations of each carrier’s cell phone strength. Users can even enter their home and work locations to determine a “Commute Rating”, which analyzes connection strength over a route calculated by Google Maps.
Unfortunately, many of these features are still buggy. While the usage graphs presented after entering our bill information were impressive, the resulting phone plan comparison was anything but. Our top suggestion featured a T-mobile plan with a data charge of over $185M (obviously in error). The signal-strength map never seemed to materialize over the standard Google Maps view, though the “Commute Rating” feature worked fine. (Update: We’ve tried the phone plan comparison again and it works well now)
Despite these shortcomings, the site is still useful and allows the average beta tester to save $225 annually according to company statistics.
Billshrink is headed by CEO Peter Pham, a former Photobucket executive who joined the company in February.
Peter Pham, VP of Business Development over at Photobucket(acquired by FIM last May) has resigned to head up a new company, BillShrink, as CEO.
BillShrink, which has been in development for the past seven months and largely under the radar, will launch in a couple of weeks with the aim of helping users save money. Its strategy lies in suggesting better service packages for select verticals, starting with cellular phone plans.
Consumers will answer a set of cell phone service-related questions and optionally submit their wireless account username and password. The service will then extract your usage habits, assess your answers, and suggest an optimal set of wireless package configurations from the wide range of plans and add-ons that providers offer. This Orbitz-like result set can be tweaked by changing your preferences, for example, in favor of more coverage over lower prices.
Much of BillShrink’s power will come from its web scraping and normalization engine that will gather and make sense of the deals provided by the various cellular providers. The company aims to improve on suggestion services like LowerMyBills by moving beyond comparison grids and making clear suggestions that have been generated by the analysis of many factors.
BillShrink will eventually move into other verticals, such as credit cards and insurance plans, with the end goal of becoming a destination that consumers can trust and return to frequently for spending advice. The company will primarily generate revenue from lead generation, similarly to Mint.
Schwark Satyavolu and Samir Kothari co-founded BillShrink, which has taken funding from Bessemer Venture Partners.
