Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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December 21, 2007

Demand for Online Money-Management Tools

I recently wrote an article for Online Banking Review, Facebooking Your Finances which talks about the readiness of Australian consumers to adopt financial applications that incorporate web 2.0 features. While visits to websites such as Mint and Wesabe are still to gain traction, there is plenty of evidence in Hitwise that indicates demand for enhanced-financial applications by Australian Internet users. To illustrate, the below table shows the top 10 finance-related search variations on 'calculators':

You'll see a variety of finance products, including 'home loan calculators' and 'superannuation calculators'. Other variations out of a possible 449 terms include, 'retirement', 'savings' and 'budget' calculators.

Several banks and insurance websites offer many of these kinds of tools. We can however illustrate with Hitwise data a significant amount of cross-referral traffic within the Banks & Financial Insitutions category, with 56.53% downstream traffic in November 2007. To put this into context, Travel had a cross-referral rate of 39.5%. This is one indication that users are accessing multiple accounts across different institutions.

The implication is that there is an opportunity to provide web-based tools that feed in financial information across all user accounts. As we're yet to see evidence here of consumers trusting web 2.0 websites with their financial data, yet alone share that information with other users, providing data-enhanced finance tools on trusted institutional websites could be an intermediary step in meeting consumer demand for better money-management tools.