Monetise monitoring A$150 million of funds

Consumers have linked A$150 million of funds to the Monetise platform since the "personal finance organiser" site was launched in February.

Monetise, which is based on the Yodlee aggregator service, allows users to link their accounts to its site, which then analyses their banking behavior.

Monetise gives users a score, which is an assessment of whether they are getting the best banking products for their needs, and it recommends what it considers superior alternatives.

Users load their transaction account, savings account, credit card, mortgage, term deposit and superannuation account details (sign-on details included) and Monetise refreshes the data every day using Yodlee's screen-scraping technology.

Monetise chief executive Taichi Hoshino said the service showed that most people could get better value for money or better returns from their banking products. The average score so far is 42 per cent.

Hoshino said: "We say that most people could improve their household cashflow by about A$2000 a year by selecting more suitable banking products."

He said the biggest savings came from mortgages and term deposits because of the large balances involved. However, the biggest savings in percentage terms have been coming from changing savings accounts.

"People go into a savings account on a honeymoon offer. When the introductory period is over they tend to stay in the account even though it is paying them a small ongoing rate. In other cases they fail to meet the covenants, such as putting in the required minimum deposit each month."

Monetise does not charge consumers for the service or take a commission from the financial institutions whose products it recommends.

Hoshino said the business was still in its start-up phase and was considering a number of revenue streams. These might include licensing the Monetise intellectual property to finance brokers and other intermediaries.

"Users tend to go in there every couple of weeks to have a look and, anecdotally, we know they are taking our recommendations."

Hoshino said services such as Monetise had the potential to replace comparison sites, which have been under fire from regulators recently. Some comparison sites have claimed to present a big universe of products for comparison, when the product set has actually been quite small.

Others have been accused of taking payments from product manufacturers to prefer their products.

"Comparison sites were a big step forward when they came along but compiling and dumping a lot of product data on a website with no explanation is not user friendly," Hoshino said.