Geezeo co-founder Peter Glyman tells me that the white-label offering was core to their strategy since the beginning and the time is right as they have been receiving more and more inquiries about the service. This actually is a good time for Geezeo to reach out to the financial institutions. The banks are trying to keep their costs down but provide enough unique services to keep their customers. This white label option will remove the need to build a similar suite of tools in-house and eliminate the maintenance costs as well.

Back in November Geezeo launched their financial marketplace and just about a year ago they received an investment from TheStreet.com.

It looks like a great way for Geezeo to earn additional revenue based on the affiliate revenue earned from users who clickthrough the marketplace. Geezeo co-founder Peter Glyman tells me that they are looking to widgetize the marketplace and those who embed the widget.

Mint has also started to add more content to the site including how-to guides on reducing credit card debt and paying off student loans. Both Geezeo and Mint have great personal finance blogs. This content is very search engine friendly and should help Mint to drive more visitors to the site and potentially to the Mint service.

Mint currently self-reports over 400,000 customers (no word on active customers).

Geezeo’s new design is in beta and here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

Mint’s new design is available today to all of their customers:

Check out our coverage of online personal finance management apps: Mint, Geezeo, Quicken and Wesabe.

Geezeo’s tagline is, "Educated Financial Decisions." The tools they provide help you to track, monitor and review your finances to keep things in order. With the current state of the economy, Geezeo should be playing up the nature of their tool in helping stretch every dollar. This deal represents more than just an investment by a VC; it will provide significant distribution for Geezeo and increase their membership levels by joining the mainstream and leaving the tech-only market.

The other sites that TheStreet currently operates include: Stockpickr.com, BankingMyWay.com and MainStreet.com. I am curious whether any of the current U.S. online financial tools will expand internationally.

Check out my interview with the Geezeo founders. Other companies in the online money management space include Spendview and Wesabe.

Quicken Online has a different business model than the competition – free trial then $2.99/month. Most of the competitors are either using some form of advertising or, in Mint’s case, savings proposals based on the data you upload.

If you’ve been reading CenterNetworks for a while, you know that I have issues with all of these sites that require you to give them all of your financial passwords so they can access your system. Wesabe is the only one who offers an upload option so you can decide how much to trust them. Quicken Online faces the same issues as the others as you are required to give them all of your logins and passwords for your financial institutions. Unlike the others, Intuit has a 10 billion dollar market cap and has been creating Quicken for 25 years. Does that change my opinion on it? Perhaps a pinch but still not enough as I’d like. Especially when at the end of the video below they joke that they purchased a verisign security system to make customers feel better. Oh snap, the Verisign logo is gone now – but it’s in the video – what does that mean?

Outside of the data security issues, the application looks like a standard Web application. Think of the most basic Quicken version, and you have it. I would have preferred that they separated it from the rest of the Quicken Web site and given it a fresh look and feel. Right now it feels jammed into the old Quicken site. This is an area that the competition will need to capitalize on. Especially because from what I’ve seen the competition is using "socialness" and most of them are using heavier trending to help you spend less and save more.

To try to hit the early adopter tech set, they created an iPhone app. Actually it’s not iPhone specific, it’s just a mobile version of the site. They do note that this version is only available on the iPhone and not the Blackberry or other mobile devices.

Intuit has a short video demo of the product which is worth checking out. Also check out Rafe’s review from his exclusive access a month ago.

Here are a couple screenshots showing the text functions and the iPhone mobile site:

They have also switched their live chat from Meebo to 37Signals Campfire product. Co-founder Peter Glyman said of the change, "… to allow for group chat and better real time support."

The other addition to the site is budgeting. Glyman notes, "Taking center stage is the ability to set spending targets and measure your progress throughout the month aka "Budgets". Personally I think budgeting is incredibly painful and something I’ve never been very good at. So…keeping our low tolerance for hard core budgeting (yawn) in mind we set out to create a "better way". We knew that when we built our budgeting features we would have to do it right..do it simple, make it easy and fun. That’s the Geezeo way. That’s how we roll." Budgeting is critical for proper money management and will be a good addition to the Geezeo feature lineup.

The budgets allow you to track how your spending works in categories along with across categories to make sure your spending makes sense as a whole. They are working on sms alerts as you approach your budget targets. The one thing they can’t do is prevent you from overspending!

Lastly, yes, I still have my security concerns with Geezeo. I know they are obsessed with security but it takes time for trust to be built.  Check out our extensive coverage of Geezeo.

I always look forward to meeting startups and developers for our conversations but this one I was really looking forward to. I have written several times about the other two big startups in the financial space: Mint and Geezeo and being a former accountant, the personal financial space has a tremendous amount of room for growth. My biggest issue with the other two is around security. Geezeo has more features than Mint but I have the same security concerns with both. Unfortunately Mint has some interesting corporate goals and has ignored most of my questions but I am still open to a discussion with them as well.

Now let’s focus on Wesabe. We began by discussing marketing plans and Marc noted that the majority of traffic to Wesabe comes from Google which is stronger over time than a blog post on a top blog because Googlers actually need his product each time vs. a small handful from a blog post. Wesabe has a very strong community.

The founders spent two years interviewing over 1500 people about their spending habits and what they would be looking for in an online tool. Their goal was to build something robust because, "If it’s the same as Quicken, why not just use Quicken?" Wesabe is an online financial management tool. It uses tagging to help organize your charges.

Most of our time together was discussing security. Where Wesabe differs from Mint/Geezeo is that Wesabe allows you to "decide how much to trust Wesabe". What this means is that you have a choice to either plug in your logins or you can upload the exported files from your bank Web site. I like this a lot. Their application for logins also works very differently than the others. It’s a desktop app (or Firefox addon) in which you put your logins into it and after logging in, Wesabe exports the files and then it works the same as if you upload the files yourself. All login info is stored on your desktop pc and not on the remote servers. They have a data bill of rights for their customers.

We spoke about whether they use a middleman to get the data. Wesabe doesn’t; they build their own from the ground up. Both mint and Geezeo use data middlemen. Yodelee is one of the middlemen and Marc noted that when they met with Yodelee, their policy is to retain the user’s data even when the customer deletes the data off the Web site and there are very high data charges associated with Yodelee. I am sure there are benefits for using the data middleman as well.

Wesabe has an open API to allow others to build on what they have created. They are working on adding monetization currently and Marc believes that advertising won’t be one of the options because he wants you to save your money, not spend it on whatever is being advertised. Their business model will never be at odds with their customer focus of helping customers reach their financial goals. You can even speak directly to the CEO every day.

Wesabe began development in December 2005 and launched in November 2006. I asked if it was in Beta and Marc slightly raised his voice and said, "No way we would be in beta, this is your financial data we are working with!" We then spoke about the new beta software on Virgin America and how scary it is to be on a beta airplane but I will save that for another post :)

Lastly we spoke about the community aspect of Wesabe. Wesabe aggregates data from it’s customers anonymously to provide tips and recommendations for it’s members. I wish I had pulled out my camera when Marc explained how this works but it’s pretty interesting. Let’s say that 10 Wesabe customers show charges for a new pizzeria and then the next month there are no charges from that pizzeria, it might be safe to say that the customers didn’t enjoy the experience. Wesabe can help alert others in the same area to previous customer’s reactions. And the same is true in reverse.

All in all, I am most impressed with Wesabe’s ability to allow me to choose how much I want to trust them. All three services mentioned could be the big winner over time and there is plenty of room for all three to do very well. What’s great is each of them is taking a different approach to their product which should provide a good option for each type of person.

Thanks for spending some time with me Marc!

Theron has posted on his blog displaying the image below and calling it, "douche baggery". He then continues:

"The founder of Mint and one of his developers decided they wanted to show us at Geezeo that not only do they have terrible taste in hats, but that pettiness and foul language towards a competing company is part of the silicon valley way. I don’t blame them for being upset, after all, with a smaller team and less resources we’ve been able to beat them to the punch in every aspect of what we do. Well, let’s be fair, I wouldn’t create a goal on Mint’s site because they don’t have goals. Come to think of it, they don’t have groups either, or support for investment accounts, or mortgages, or auto loans. "

Mint has received a variety of press since their launch and the big win at Techcrunch40, both positive and negative. On the positive side is TechCrunch authoring a bunch of posts about the service. On the negative side, there are posts including, "Mint thinks I am cheating on my wife".

My feeling about these apps remains the same, I am not comfortable sharing my ultra-sensitive logins with a brand new startup. While both apps talk about their superior security, will they be there for me when someone breaks into my account? And how will say WaMu respond when they find out that I have been accessing my WaMu account using a third-party service. Unfortunately Aaron completely ignored my questions on the TC comments thread about the above and about insurance for liability. I have also read a variety of reports that the savings that Mint recommends are not possible for that person either due to implied savings that Mint doesn’t recognize, location, etc.

"Automated access to aggregated brokerage accounts has been our most requested feature request from day one," said Geezeo co-founder Shawn Ward. "Geezeo users demand a holistic view of their finances when managing their money, and we are pleased to provide just that."

I have been impressed with the level of visibility Geezeo is receiving from mainstream press and media outlets. Geezeo is in the same category (social finance) with the newly-launched TC40 winner Mint but Geezeo provides the full view on a person’s finances.

Another update from Geezeo is around a partnership with the Motley Fool: "Geezeo is partnering with The Motley Fool to integrate that group’s innovative CAPS stock rating service, in which investors predict whether stocks will outperform or underperform the S&P 500 and over what time frame this will happen. CAPS ratings currently cover over 5,000 stocks and are generated from more than 1 million individual predictions."

Check out our previous Geezeo coverage and here is a sample screenshot of the new investments page:

As I have noted before, I still have conerns about the security of my financial info and what my financial institutions would do if one of the social finance sites was to lose my data.

Here is how Peter Glyman, Geezeo co-founder descibes iWant, "The iWant application also allows you to connect your goals to your bank accounts so you can track your progress in real time. For example, lets say you want to "Save for an iPhone" you can link this goal to your savings account so when your account reaches a certain amount you’ll have enough money saved to buy the iPhone.  iWant is a fun way to think about saving and setting goals and is a great extension of Geezeo’s "Goal" to reach young adults and help them better track and manage their finance."

Here are a couple screenshots:

Geezeo

• Bigtime updates to the transactions module - auto-tagging, cleaner interface, etc. 
• We’ve added Safari support
• OFX data uploads to get your historical transactions
• Simple analytics with graphs for credit card accounts
• More internal security checks and balances
• Database clustering for more data reliability

Read their blog entry for more details and our previous Geezeo coverage.

down2night

Mark Michael, down2night founder sent over the following quote about their planned expansion, "by end of summer we will be national (with your city, town, college or university) with some international cities including London, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Sydney and Frankfurt."

Additional new features include:

• Nightlife based social networking (your friends, messaging)
• Heat-map of the hottest spots
• Nightlife venue based search
• Search for the mood you’re in: after-work, happy-hour, swanky, chill
• See who’s going to a venue that night (i.e. tonight’s rally)
• Able to create a night invite, select the spots (one or multiple) you want to go, and then invite your friends you go out with to join you (evite style)
• Add your house or apartment as "your pad" which only your friends can see. Then you can then add this to your night invites
• Yahoo Maps Mash up (thermal heat map). you can see what spots are going to be hot tonight in your city with a thermal map style overlay
• Upload your pictures going out tag them to a venue's page
• Now in 22 cities 
• Over 30,000 events across the US and Canada
• Mobile alerts for your favorite spots

Check the down2night blog for the latest news and our previous down2night coverage.

SaneBull 

SaneBull has launched two new plugins for their stock tracking service. It's pretty neat. One is for Wordpress and the other is for everyone else. The Wordpress plugin is very easy as anytime you add a stock quote to your blog entry, it will automatically convert it to a SaneBull optimized quote. You put your mouse over the stock symbol and a small window appears with the latest quote and volume. A click on the quote gets you even more information. It's very cool and almost like intellitxt for stock quotes!

Check out the installation details and screenshots on the SaneBull blog and also check out our previous SaneBull coverage.

Along with Wesabe, Geezeo was part of a piece in the Wall Street Journal last week. Geezeo wants to be considered an "Online Quicken Alternative" and the product offers a lot of new and innovative options past what Quicken or Money do.

For example, Shawn noted that a large percentage of Americans still have their money in savings accounts making sub-1% in interest. When you sign on to Geezeo, they will make recommendations on how to improve your savings by moving to accounts offering 4-5x more. This can amount to thousands of extra dollars a year. Also, the system will offer you suggestions on reducing your credit card debt by looking at using lower interest rate credit cards.

Their target is the 18-34 age bracket and they have ambassadors for their product at major university campuses around the U.S. I suggested to them that they might look at offering seminars on dealing with credit and how to effectively use student loans. I know when I got to college I was hit with 100 credit card offers and wound up with a large amount of debt quickly. Their seminars will provide two benefits: helping students and getting more subs for Geezeo.

So what is Geezeo? Basically it's a "smart" way of managing your money. I say smart because the system learns as it goes. You aggregate all of your bank account and credit information into the system, and it will smart-tag it as it goes along. You can also tag your items as well and then the system learns from your tagging to apply to other users in the future. Geezeo will also offer suggestions on other accounts that you might want to use to either make more or spend less. This is how they generate revenue by affiliate subs with the banking providers. Check out here, here and here for a more detailed product overview.

My immediate reaction when they said, "Yea, Allen you just give us all of your logins and we take it from there" is about security. With hundreds of startups out there, what faith should I have that either of the following won't happen: a. they will just wipe my accounts clean since they have access or b. that their security model will allow a hacker in to accomplish a. Check out their security overview page for some geez speak on how they protect your money.

We spent 45 minutes discussing security and I feel more comfortable now. I asked them to put together a video overview of the security they are using but basically its secure. They are using CashEdge which powers most of the online banks for authentication and they don't store any of your login information after you create your account. They also compared it to storing quicken files on your laptop and your laptop is stolen which would be worse than if someone was able to hack into Geezeo.

There are also mobile components to Geezeo. While I am not a mobile banker, by the looks of the Citibank ads all over NYC, there is a growing percentage that are mobile bankers. And the young'ns are using it more than ever. They also provide support via a MeeboMe widget.

I think the Geez'rs are smart by going after the college and university demographic. Students typically suck at managing their money and overspending on a daily basis. By using Geezeo they might be able to do a better job which could result in extra pocket money for the bars and clubs. Best of luck to Geezeo, if you have tried the service, please post your thoughts in the comments.