Green Sherpa Flexes For Competition With Mint/Quicken

A few days ago I had the opportunity to talk with Erin Lozano, the COO and founder of Green Sherpa about how the company has changed since the launch a year ago.

Green Sherpa ended its Beta program in August and launched its full subscription services. They now support more than 10,000 financial institutions and in addition to those already serviced by Yodlee, also can manually establish connections to their customers’ banks—a service the competition isn’t offering. They’ve also added more cash-flow planning tools and goal-tracking tools for users and are getting ready to debut a few more new tools in the next 60 days (though I don’t get to report on those...yet.).

Green Sherpa is one of the only hybrid aggregating services as they can combine automated aggregation as well as set up individual connections. Green Sherpa worked to establish additional layers of security beyond what is offered by their aggregation provider. They’re also one of just a handful of software-as-a-service (SaaS) or “cloud” software providers that is charging a fee for an online-only product in the personal financial management field.

The company is lean and mean, with six employees and a ridiculously low breakeven point of only 5,000 subscribers, but their personal touch and low price (US $7.95 a month or $5.95 for pre-paying a year) sets them apart from other companies who provide software. Greens Sherpa is striving to provide its customers with an intimate snapshot of their own financial progress and future, not data on a dashboard.

Green Sherpa eliminates the manual data of Excel and Quicken, but also allows customers to download their own data to save, archive and manipulate, even if they choose to cancel the service.

The company also has an active advisory team including former leadership from Commission Junction.

Green Sherpa rolled out an affiliate program this month, which is fully operated on their site, not served through an ad company.

I asked Lozano about how the marketplace has changed since we spoke last in March. She explained that Mint and Quicken have released features that are becoming more forward-looking, and hence now more competing in the same space. Following the recent announcement that Mint would be moving under the Intuit brand, Lozano surprisingly said this is good news to her. “We think that this validates the web based personal financial management space which will be good for all remaining players in the market, including Green Sherpa” she said via email in a follow up conversation.

One thing that hasn’t changed is Green Sherpa’s commitment to a valuable forward-looking product, zero conflict of interest (not advertising/selling to subscribers) and complete privacy to users.

Green Sherpa has changed in one way—temporarily suspending subscriptions, giving users a 90 day free trial period to use the service. Existing subscribers will receive an additional 90 days free. The official company announcement to subscribers is expected out this week.

Jessica Ward is a freelance writer in Seattle, writing on family and personal finance. You can also find her online at www.jessicaward.me or www.thepennywisefamily.com

At Finovate 2009 Budget Solutions Abound

Holy budgets Batman! Finovate 2009 is showcasing no less than ten (count them 10!) budget solutions for personal finances. I explored some of these on my blog this past week as I wrote all about budgeting for a week, but there’s a lot out there and I couldn't do them justice there.

For the sake of the reader, I’m going to make some categories here to differentiate what might be right for your style as a prospective user or curious reader. Some of these will overlap due to the nature of the features. All are free to use unless otherwise noted. The denotation ($) means fee-based and (*$) means free during Beta trials, or some features are subscriber-based.

I included a “social media” category here—because two of these are very similar to common social applications. Wesabe is a lot like Facebook in that people can recommend or comment and share information. Geezeo has a lot of Twitter-like features and their “confession booth” even integrates with Twitter (not to mention, it's outrageously addictive).

Rudder is in a bit of a class of its own. It appears to include bill-pay features (note to self to play with this one a bit more).

There are essentially two "classes" of personal finance application in my view. Those that require data-entry of transactions, and those that don't. Otherwise, the items below appear in no particular order and none of these are paid placements.

Aggregator
Green Sherpa ($)
Mint
Wesabe
Geezeo

Quicken (*$)
Rudder

Data-Entry

iBearSoft (mobile only) ($)

LooniesDesk (*$)

BudgetPulse

CalendarBudget (*$)

Social Media Features

Wesabe

Geezeo

Mobile Apps
Mint
Green Sherpa ($)

Wesabe
Ibearsoft (*$)
LooniesDesk(*$)