Intuit Eyes Younger Customers With Quicken Online

For years, Intuit’s Quicken desktop software has dominated the market for affluent baby boomers fixated on tracking their spending and investments. Tuesday the company set its sights on a new audience: twenty- to thirtysomethings who live paycheck to paycheck and might never have balanced a checkbook.

The Mountain View company rolled out Quicken Online, a stripped-down Web-based version of Quicken that will primarily download banking transactions and automatically categorize them so users can identify where their money disappears.

"They want the answer to the question, ‘Am I living within my means?’ " said Jim Del Favero, product manager for the new $3-a-month subscription service.

The software Goliath’s move is rumbling through a competitive territory populated by start-ups such as Mint.com, Wesabe and Geezeo. Those companies already have devised eye-catching tools that combine colorful Quicken-like pie charts with elements of social networking and cell phone alerts — but for free.

The choices for consumers will get even better when mighty banks invade the market — and add the ability to transfer money among accounts, predicts Emmett Higdon, a senior analyst with Forrester Research in New York. Wells Fargo, Bank of America and others recently began targeting young consumers with banking services through their cell phones.

"I would think the bigger banks would be hopping on this bandwagon

fairly quickly because they already have that (transaction) data," Higdon said. "Banks were kind of sitting on the sidelines, thinking this is neat stuff, but this is No. 42 on the priority list. What this may do is get this bumped up the banks’ priority list more quickly."

The services all start with a basic common procedure: They collect all the transaction data from your savings, checking and credit card accounts into one place. Immediately, you’re given a quick reading on whether you’re on the verge of ringing up hefty bank fees by bouncing a check, draining your debit account or exceeding your credit card limit.

The services also automatically categorize how you spend your money, enabling you to see at a glance whether dining out is eating up the cash for your utility bill. It’s even possible to drill down to measure how much you’re spending at specific stores, such as Starbucks vs. McDonald’s.

Beyond that, the services begin to diverge a bit. For instance, Quicken will alert you when your Visa bill is due. But Mint.com, a crosstown start-up, will also send a variety of alerts to your cell phone or e-mail when, say, your balance draws precariously low, if you exceed your credit limit, or when large purchases or deposits land.

Likewise, Mint.com’s software examines your data to recommend institutions where you could save money by shifting idle cash to a higher-yielding savings account or by applying for a credit card that pays rebates. Rather than recommending products, however, Geezeo of Framingham, Mass., aims to establish a vibrant social-networking "supermarket" for financial products where consumers can compare products and rate companies.

Meanwhile, San Francisco-based Wesabe hopes to stand apart by developing a social-networking site where users can log on for advice and support from others as they tackle personal goals, such as paying off a credit balance or saving up for a car.

All of them, including Intuit, downplay fears that concentrating all your financial data in one service could make them ripe targets for hackers. Though their answers vary in the details, each claims they’re using state-of-the-art encryption, that users can log in using anonymous e-mail names, and that financial data is kept separate from anything that can identify users. Wesabe goes so far as to say it couldn’t even match up a user’s name to financial data even if subpoenaed.

In this regard, Quicken Online’s entry into the field is good news for the little-known start-ups, said Geezeo co-founder Shawn Ward. "It validates that maybe this isn’t as risky as people were thinking."

Ward also sees an advantage because Quicken Online charges a monthly $2.99 subscription fee. In contrast, Geezeo, Mint.com and Wesabe are free. The start-ups have varying strategies for making money, such as generating leads for financial institutions, selling advertising or charging for premium services.

"This is the Facebook generation," Ward said. "They’ve grown up in a culture that if you can’t figure out how to deliver what I want on the Web for free, shame on you. I think it’s already ingrained in people that if it’s on the Web, it should be free."

Contact Mark Schwanhausser at mschwanhausser@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5543.