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I was previously the system architect for a financial institution who attempted to use Wesabe's PFM integration in their website. I had some exchanges with Mar

I was previously the system architect for a financial institution who attempted to use Wesabe's PFM integration in their website. I had some exchanges with Marc and he was great and helpful. I was taking a big risk on signing up with Wesabe so I conviced my superiors to give me one month to set it up, and a second month to run an internal pilot and then decide if we would launch the PFM integration to all customers. Unfortunately we ran into some issues, that were minor in my mind, but my employer being in the financial services industry they have a very low tolerance for risk when working with customer's financial data, so they called off the Wesabe integration within two weeks into the first month. This was for the enterprise Wesabe product, mind you, and was around six months ago so I guess Wesabe was already in its last run anyway, but I guess not having a stable enough MVP for their enterprise customers might not have helped much. I wish you great success in your next endeavor, precipice!

rwhitman 16y ago
Oh, shoot I just made a comment about this. I was suggesting if they had focused squarely on enterprise earlier, they might have been fine. Do you think a future finance aggregation tool, that was focused entirely on enterprise (with subsequent accountability), would have had a better chance of success? So many smaller banks have online banking that is lacking, I'm always frustrated that there aren't more companies trying to make that experience better.
- HectorRamos 16y ago
  That's actually what BankSimple is trying to solve, right? The problem with enterprise is, like I said, they have so many regulations and tight tolerances, they are not very startup friendly. However, if Wesabe was bought by Intuit and in turn Intuit offered exactly the same product that Wesabe already had, the banks would easily pay $10,000 a month for it just based on the name. For reference, Wesabe was around $2,500 for their most expensive enterprise plan, which was very inexpensive when compared to having Intuit add your bank to Quicken for $10,000 a month.
  - rwhitman 16y ago
    I thought BankSimple was its own online bank. Yea, I imagine you could get away with a very hefty license fee. I know of one company that charges affiliate TV stations $5m a year license for essentially a glorified hosted CMS. If they can get that for something that doesn't even remotely require the kind of privacy a bank system needs, the price tag for an online banking tool should be pretty high. Even $500k-$1m+ a year seems reasonable by comparison. Its really all a matter of support and sales prowess
    - HectorRamos 16y ago
      An actual BankSimple employee might be able to explain it better, so I welcome any corrections, and I might be very wrong since I believe that only during the last two weeks or so is that the whole team has been built and started wholly working on the product, but this is what I knew about BankSimple from a few months back. They are working on a great online front end, focusing on awesome user experience, while partnering with another financial institution (just one, or more, I'm not really sure) to handle the back end: all of the transfers, payments, ACH handling, and so on. So basically you have this awesome online "bank" with a great web PFM but the business processes are actually being handled by an established brick and mortar bank. There are many banks and they do one thing great - handle money - but many of them have awful web/internet teams. So in comes BankSimple, they solve the web part of the equation and partner up with one or more banks. If you think about it, it kinda sounds like what Mint could be if they were more than an aggregator and closer to an online bank.

rwhitman 16y ago

Oh, shoot I just made a comment about this. I was suggesting if they had focused squarely on enterprise earlier, they might have been fine. Do you think a future finance aggregation tool, that was focused entirely on enterprise (with subsequent accountability), would have had a better chance of success? So many smaller banks have online banking that is lacking, I'm always frustrated that there aren't more companies trying to make that experience better.

HectorRamos 16y ago
That's actually what BankSimple is trying to solve, right? The problem with enterprise is, like I said, they have so many regulations and tight tolerances, they are not very startup friendly. However, if Wesabe was bought by Intuit and in turn Intuit offered exactly the same product that Wesabe already had, the banks would easily pay $10,000 a month for it just based on the name. For reference, Wesabe was around $2,500 for their most expensive enterprise plan, which was very inexpensive when compared to having Intuit add your bank to Quicken for $10,000 a month.
- rwhitman 16y ago
  I thought BankSimple was its own online bank. Yea, I imagine you could get away with a very hefty license fee. I know of one company that charges affiliate TV stations $5m a year license for essentially a glorified hosted CMS. If they can get that for something that doesn't even remotely require the kind of privacy a bank system needs, the price tag for an online banking tool should be pretty high. Even $500k-$1m+ a year seems reasonable by comparison. Its really all a matter of support and sales prowess
  - HectorRamos 16y ago
    An actual BankSimple employee might be able to explain it better, so I welcome any corrections, and I might be very wrong since I believe that only during the last two weeks or so is that the whole team has been built and started wholly working on the product, but this is what I knew about BankSimple from a few months back. They are working on a great online front end, focusing on awesome user experience, while partnering with another financial institution (just one, or more, I'm not really sure) to handle the back end: all of the transfers, payments, ACH handling, and so on. So basically you have this awesome online "bank" with a great web PFM but the business processes are actually being handled by an established brick and mortar bank. There are many banks and they do one thing great - handle money - but many of them have awful web/internet teams. So in comes BankSimple, they solve the web part of the equation and partner up with one or more banks. If you think about it, it kinda sounds like what Mint could be if they were more than an aggregator and closer to an online bank.