Posts Tagged ‘community’

Interview with WeSeed from Finovate 2008

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

We snagged an interview with Jennifer of WeSeed at Finovate 2008 today. Check out the video above! And thanks to the WeSeed team for the great dinner event tonight!

We hope you’ve enjoyed our day-long coverage of Finovate 2008 live from New York City today. Here are some quick links to connect you with other Finovate content from today:

Check out the first 6 presenter reviews!
Check out the second 6 presenter reviews!
Check out the third 6 presenter reviews!
Check out the last 6 presenter reviews!

Finovate 2008 Coverage - The Third 6 Presenters!

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

SmartHippo
Mark’s Review:
An online community built to help increase simplicity and transparency in the mortgage lending process. Includes community ratings. Rate search engine that pulls from several sources, including other members. Lenders can feed their rates into SmartHippo for FREE, which can help smaller FIs (especially credit unions) get more exposure for their great rates.
I think your FI needs to be feeding your rates into SmartHippo if you are in their market.

Lisa’s Review:
A community-driven site geared toward helping its members save money and find the best interest rates. Members can rate different lenders in several different areas. You can give your specific information on what you’re looking for in a borrower, and the site will show you the best rates with different lenders. It’s free for lenders to show their rates on SmartHippo. The site looks great and easy to use. Community members share information on rates and FIs, but SmartHippo also goes and searches for rates to aggregate it all on their site. I’m loving this!

LendingClub
Mark’s Review:
An SEC registered (that’s a big deal) peer to peer lending site for borrowers with good credit which has kept their default rate for their lenders under 2% since their launch. In addition to allowing lenders to actually pick up loans from borrowers, Lending Club has also added a trading platform that allows them to trade and sell those loans.
I think the loan marketplace is a super interesting one that is worth giving Lending Club a look if you’d like to move into the P2P lending space.

Lisa’s Review:
The design of the site is great. LendingClub is a P2P lending site. Their differentiation as a P2P site is that lenders have the opportunity to invest in instruments that are registered with the US SEC. I’m not seeing as much of a community aspect in this site as I have in others (Zopa), but I see some unique points in this one. Definitely worth checking out.

Credit Karma
Mark’s Review:
Credit Karma is a service that provides free (like really free) access to your credit score. This allows you to monitor and assess your credit and you are offered services and discounts based on your credit score.
New to Credit Karma is a ‘personalized credit simulator’ which will allow you to input various scenarios (new credit, late payment, etc) and see the impact that event would have on your credit score.
I really dig this addition to Credit Karma and believe it can really help consumers make educated decisions about what they are doing with their credit.

Lisa’s Review:
I’ve used Credit Karma for some months now, and it’s no secret that I adore this site. From a purely consumer standpoint, I see incredible value in Credit Karma. I’m extremely interested in knowing what my financial status is at all times, including my ability to get credit if I must. This site has made it extremely easy for me to see an up-to-date number on my credit score, which is great. I think that the advertisers they have in place are great, and the fact that members can vote on offers increases the value of this site. The cool new feature is the Credit Score Simulator - very awesome.

CheckFree
Mark’s Review:
This former stand alone bill payment options now has integration into a FiServ PFM. Basic bill pay and PFM with useful multi function dashboard and nice charts. Ads, though relevant based on activity, look very intrusive and slow to disappear.
The cool thing about this product is it’s integration with consumer remote capture (scan in your check at home) but for me it’s not enough to overcome the generic nature of the rest of the offering.

Lisa’s Review:
CheckFree offers a full suite of solutions for FIs of all sizes. The site looks pretty good, and the services look nice. I like how you can see the bills when you’re looking at payment transactions. The graphics and functionality of this site are smooth. Really looks like they put a lot of effort into this. Talk about a full suite of solutions - it really is.

MoneyAisle
Mark’s Review:
MoneyAisle is a rate auction site that is fully automated. You put it in your simple criteria and a are given the best rate out there with an option to accept the bid and move on to open the account with the bank. The full transaction is handled by the bank.
A fully automated process (including account opening) seems to be the missing piece of this puzzle to make it one that I would actually use.

Lisa’s Review:
Weird commentary from someone with a mic on during the presentation. Yikes. But back to the review. I’ve seen MoneyAisle in the news recently, and I think that what they’re doing is pretty great. Providing the opportunity for smaller banks to compete for your loans is great. Smaller FIs are able to bid for your business with better rates since they don’t have a massive advertising budget as some of the bigger banks do. And the site is very transparent about the entire process, which is fantastic.

Yodlee
Mark’s Review:
Along with their PFM and account aggregation, Yodlee has been making big headway in the ‘Pay Today’ space. Through a partnership with Western Union, through Yodlee can offer immediate payment processing. This is available through their SDK and I’m sure you’ll see more built on top of this in the future.

Lisa’s Review:
Big site, about 3.5 million users on Yodlee’s PFM site. They offer some cool billpay feature looks smooth. Really great thing is that you can pay a bill at the last minute with Yodlee, something I know many people will find useful! Only downside is that there’s a fee involved, but to get money rushed over and avoid any huge issue, it’s really worth it. The site is clean and concise.

Check out the first 6 presenter reviews!
Check out the second 6 presenter reviews!
Check out the last 6 presenter reviews!

The Burst - Events and the Economy (Ep. 36)

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Download this video

Thanks for checking out this episode of BanktasticTV’s “The Burst.” Here are some important notes about this episode:

Partnership Symposium Coverage
We got a lot of really great video and interviews from Partnership Symposium last week! If you want to watch everything we got, check out this week’s “CU Scoop”. We had a great time in Indianapolis and meeting a lot of Banktastic members for the first time!

Finovate 2008
Just a reminder - Mark and I will be in NYC next week for Finovate 2008! We’re going to be live blogging this event and getting some great video interviews for next week’s episode. At this time, we’re still looking for a guest blogger, so if you’re interested please email me at lisa@banktastic.com. We’re really excited to see the presentations and visit NY! Find us at the event next week!

How is Your FI Holding Up in this Economy?
The question was asked on Banktastic several months ago, but we’ve seen a huge change in the economy since then. How is the recession hurting your FI? What significant changes have you had to make? Our economy has taken many hits over the last couple of months, so we’re wanting to know what you’re having to do to keep your FI out of trouble. Share your thoughts on Banktastic!

Subscribe to Banktastic on iTunes
All of BanktatsicTV’s shows are available on iTunes now! Click here to access our podcast page to subscribe, or open iTunes and search “BanktasticTV.”

Email Us!
Feel free to email comments or suggestions about “The Burst” to brad@banktastic.com, or post your thoughts on the Banktastic Community.

Quick Links
Banktastic
Banktastic News
Banktastic Q&A

See you next week!

-The Banktastics

The Banktastics’ Roundtable Discussion about Personalization

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

The Banktastics got together again for another casual roundtable discussion. This time the topic was the personalization of Banktastic. Each of us puts in a lot of personal effort to continually make this site better. From the “Welcome to Banktastic” emails to fixing bugs on the site, one of us is working hard behind the scenes to get that content to you.

Watch the video to get a more in-depth look into how we work to make Banktastic a great community for everyone.

Have You Seen the New Banktastic?

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Today, April 1st, we released the brand-new version of Banktastic.com. The site got a complete facelift including a new feature - company & product reviews! This is a great way for companies & consumers alike to get involved and help members of our community learn more about specific companies & their products.

We’re really excited about the big changes we’ve made to Banktastic. We spent a lot of long hours working to make this site better, and, of course, ran into a few bugs in the process. By the way, a huge thanks to those watching the countdown and endured the delay of the new site with us. It was completely worth the wait!

So take a look around the site and see what we’ve made better. Feel free to give us your feedback by commenting on this blog. Oh, and if you happened to miss our April Fool’s video about the Banktastic Water Cooler, you can watch it here:

Thanks everybody!

-Lisa Randolph, Community Manager

Help us choose the Banktastic logo!

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

Hey Banktastics,

First off, thanks so much for the responses on our survey. We sent Starbucks cards all over the world (US, Canada, Spain, France), we love and appreciate to see people getting involved in making Banktastic better.

We have been busy little bees lately putting in some really cool, desperately needed features into Banktastic and hope to roll those out in the next few days. Stay tuned for more details on that…

We’ve also been working on figuring out a logo design and are again working with the design folks over at V/M. They have done another great job and we’ve whittled it down to two that we like and want the Banktastic community have a say in the process. I mean, come on, this site is all about you guys, so why shouldn’t you, right?!

Here’s concept #1:

banktastic_c01.pdf

And here’s concept #2:

banktastic_c06.pdf (1 page)

Anyway, here are the two choices and I’m not going to be anymore descriptive than that so we can get your honest gut reactions. Vote with your feet and tell us in the comments why you like the ones you do or you can feel free to Twitter us @banktastic. Thanks Banktastics!

- The Banktastic Team

Welcome to Banktastic!

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

Our first post for Banktastic.com…we’re really excited to bring our take on ‘community’ to financial institutions. Enjoy!

If you’re interested in an invite to this industry-specific community site, come check us out!