If you’re interested, drop me a line at marc at wesabe dot com, and I can get you signed up to test the new tool I mentioned above — there’s some overlap to the ideas you’re mentioning here.

Thanks for the pointer — this definitely looks interesting to me.

Now, I may be going out on a limb here, a long, precarious limb here, but I think this would be awesome. There’s a few functionalities that are floating around between clipperz, yodlee and wesabe. Account management which clipperz does great, yodlee does ok at and wesabe does pretty minimally. There’s the financial data aspect which yodlee does great, wesabe does ok and clipperz not at all and there’s the social/wisdom of the crowds aspect which Wesabe does great and the other two not at all.

I feel like there’s some meeting point in there combining the best of clipperz security and yodlee’s data management into one central Wesabe location. :) I thik all that financial data is ultimately great for wesabe - bills and customer award programs are perfect for social network discussions and tips.

Ah well.. just my thoughts meandering and ending up on some kinda crazy thing that sounds compelling to me on paper. :)

Best,
Marc

I’m Marc Hedlund, one of the co-founders of Wesabe. Thanks much for the write-up — you make a lot of great points and obviously spent a lot of time thinking through the plusses and minuses of the two sites.

You’re absolutely right that Wesabe pulls in data in a way that, we believe, provides you with a much higher level of security and privacy, but that isn’t as smooth as it could be yet. We’re just finishing up a new release that will make this much easier and more complete than any other site — we’ll be able to pull in data automatically from far more financial institutions than anyone else.

That said, we do believe that privacy and security are extremely important, and that our method provides more on both fronts than anyone else. We do not store your account numbers, bank usernames, bank passwords, or other information on our site that is extremely sensitive and identifiable. We also let you export (in Excel, XML, and other formats) or delete your data from our site at any time.

You’re also right that we have limited account types (for now, checking, savings, credit card, credit line, and money market accounts) available on the site. We started out with the basic accounts where we felt we could provide the best value, and we’re expanding from there.

A lot of the features you mention are ones we have in development right now. For the people looking for help with cash management, what we have today is a great start — but for people such as yourself who have more kinds of accounts, we’re not that there yet.

You’re also right that we need to do a lot more to document the site. We have a great group of users in our “Make Wesabe Better” group, and they do well at helping each other work out what they need from the site, but right now, the best documentation we provide is the set of YouTube videos available on our site.

Some of these things will come with more time (we just launched in November, so the site is still very new), and some are coming very quickly. You have a system that works for you now, but as we add more of the features you’re requested — and we try to be extremely responsive to user’s requests — I hope you’ll give us another try and see if we’re living up to these promises. We announce all of our new features on our blog, blog.wesabe.com.

Thanks again for such a careful review. If you have any other suggestions for ways we could improve Wesabe for you, please drop me a line at marc at wesabe.com.

Best,
Marc Hedlund, Wesabe