ArthaMoney Money Manger is a web based tool to manage all financial accounts at one place. The product is very similar to Mint(Read: Intuit tie up with Moneycontrol), only that this is for India.
The app allows you to provide username/password of your financial online accounts and it will fetch and auto categorize your spendings and transactions. The app provides a read only interface i.e. you cannot make any transactions here. The account credentials are saved securely and you do not need to re-enter anything. The service is currently integrated with most of the Indian financial institutions which includes banks, trading, insurance, and mutual fund companies. You can also track your reward points from airlines. They have a very neat interface and decent reports generation only that the site is little slow.
There are 2 ways they could have done this. Either a tie-up with all the financial institutions of India to get access to their Database or a HTML scraper individually for web interfaces of all financial institutions. The earlier involves too much bureaucracy and if they did it that way it is really a very appreciable task. But if they have designed HTML scrapers, which i thing they did looking at the sites slow speed and what i know about tie-ups with big shots, they might face heat from the regulatory authorities. Also, regular design changes on the source end can be a pain to catch up with.
The monetization is already in place as they are pushing financial products. Artha Money is essentially a one stop financial products shop so this offering makes a lot of sense.
This is a much needed product in India where generally all the adult family members have a bank account and multiple trading accounts but only one member keeps track of them. Though there will be some resistance for adaption as financial data is involved.
Do give it a spin and share your views. Do you think they can make it big as Mint?
Some other startups trying to solve similar problem: TrackSpends OnyeM 11rupees(short circuited). But none of them provided any direct integration of accounts. All of them were more of a report generation tool as you were required to punch in every transaction manually.
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]
I have been waiting for a Mint like service in India for quite some time. This is a good news, but most people do not realize the security of giving your username/password to these sites.
The main problem in India (as against in west) is that none of the Indian banks provide a secured api to money management applications (third party developers). Hence these third party developers resort to create a browser bot, which logs in to the bank website with username/passwd you provide, and simulates mouse click/key strokes to retrieve the required data.
This alone is a huge risk. If the bank website change a little layout, your mouse click simulation for ‘get details’ can actually click ‘transfer money’. And since the bot used the login/passwd provided by you as far as the bank is concerned, you made the transaction and not the bot.
Ofcourse I am exaggerating. But you do get the point right? There is just no way they can guarantee you a read only access. Oops the bot clicked on the wrong link.
Another issue I faced earlier (with yodlee) was that when I changed my bank password, and forgot to update it with yodlee, it kept trying to login with old incorrect password. After 3 failed attempts the bank just locked my account. It took me one full week to get my account unlocked.
I hope people understand these issues before using these applications (Others I can think of are yodlee.in, perfios)
The problem of transaction wont be there as transaction password is different from login password. Atleast it is for the 3 banks that i use.
But surely adaption will face friction from security point of view.
I agree with that one, but there are other banks which don’t have separate passwords. More than a transaction, I fear my account getting locked down due to incorrect/an-authorized tries.
There are multiple levels of security which indian banks impose, that these scrappers/bots just ignore. Look at Virtual keypad entry. They cannot use it as the layout is random.
I think (a)getting financial data from banks and (b)providing a rock solid awesome money tracker are two different things. If you provide (b) I don’t mind downloading the account statements myself and uploading it once in a while. They should focus more on (b) than (a). Maybe in a year or two the banks will open some access to thrid-party developers.
Artha Money seems to store users’ account credentials on their servers… not very comfortable about that.. I have been using Perfios for sometime now and really liked it – automatic updates from all my accounts, asset / liability / expense reports and, they take care of problems like password expiry etc that Mayank mentioned. And, Perfios never stores your account credentials on their servers – much safer..
Safer against third-party attackers who might hack Perfios servers. Sure.
But what if you don’t trust the client-side code of Perfios?
The trouble is most banking credentials are too capable. What we need is readonly API keys from our financial institutions.
Standardization of financial transactions export format (eg. OFX) will also make the apps more robust.
Mint uses software powered by Yodlee, and Artha Money is using the same software. Yodlee can be used by anyone for a license fee. Other banks in India are launching a similar service using this software, so Artha Money is not going to be the only one offering this account management service.
Yes, Yodlee uses some secret patented technology to get this financial data. I am assuming this patented technology is running those bots on bank websites. But I may be wrong. Personally I will not trust any of these money management products (atleast for now).
Hi Mayank
It is not patented technology.It is plain Screen Scrapping, but they did make a lot of money with it.
I have created a similar open source tool for india.Recently launched http://www.letthebucksgrow.com
This kind of product is not difficult to make.
Regards
Rajat
Also how could i miss one important point…I am able to parse the ICICI bank statement stored in .txt format directly.So you can download transactions in .txt format to your box and upload them to your product installation (all happens on your desktop)
Sudeep is absolutely right. Yodlee has the tie-up with the financial institutions, Artha Money is basically white-labelling the Yodlee interface.
Others can launch easily – just a matter of money (not much) and willingness (not much either)
@sudeep you are correct they use Yodlee. In fact Yes Bank has already deployed the Yodlee personal finance module on their online banking site.
Also how could i miss one important point regarding http://www.letthebucksgrow.com .I am able to parse the ICICI bank statement stored in .txt format directly.So you can download transactions in .txt format to your box and upload them to your product installation (all happens on your desktop)
I made an opensource tool similar to this but it runs offline on the desktop and its free as its opensource.Do put in your comments for the same http://www.letthebucksgrow.com.
I can integrate it with the yodlee API, not sure how much it will cost me, since mine is an opensource product, but in anycase do give my product a try, its free opensource and you can play with the code as well.
Also i product has good charting available.
Do send in your comments if you find bugs /etc and i would improve it.
http://www.letthebucksgrow.com
Also NOTE THAT YOU CAN IMPORT ICICI BANK TRANSACTIONS IN THIS on your desktop.
Its a web product that runs offline on your desktop
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