I dove into Mint.com hoping for some great tips to save money. What I got was disappointing and just wrong.

For example, they want me to switch from my current AMEX (Costco Rewards) to another AMEX with Rewards. Hello, my AMEX has rewards, in fact better than what you are recommending. To be fair, you say that you don’t know the rewards that are on my AMEX, but why assume it’s a big zip? Makes me feel like you think I am stupid or something. Hey, look at this bonehead, he does’nt even know there’s a better card, he’s sitting there with a big fat interest rates and no rewards, ha ha ha, what a moron.  We’ll rescue this sorry sod with a great “offer”.

The other “offer” was to switch my TimeWarner Cable ($120) to some Verizon TV service I have never heard of for $41. Hmm, lets see, my TimeWarner service is broadband (better than DSL), cable TV (more than the Verizon service), and voice. The Verizon “offer” was for just TV. It’s like saying, hey, change your internet/tv/phone service to a tv service and you can save money. Actually, that’s exactly what’s it saying.

Can I turn these “offers” off? So far, they are just not helping.

Disclosure: Andrew is a principal at Jwaala, a software company that makes personal financial management solutions for banks and credit unions.

While many banks and credit unions are dumping their card portfolio’s this
news makes one think “wow, smart move.” A new payment platform company
named RevolutionMoney announced (today) their plans to yank the rug out from
under traditional card payment processors by circumventing the credit card networks that charge merchants an average of 1.9% on transactions.

This couldn’t have come at a better time, as I spent two frustrating hours last night
searching merchant account programs looking for a better deal for my wife’s
new business. I went to bed with no resolution and angry.

Revolution Money believes they can reduce traditional fees by 75%; a mere fraction of what card companies are charging today. This is sure to make every merchant jump with joy, including myself. But this isnt jsut a one trick pony. By no mean the first to take on PayPal, RevolutionExchange (one of two products launched, today) allows consumers to transfer funds to anybody via the Internet, for FREE! Think free International wire transfers!

Now, I don’t know if that is part of the deal, but it sure makes one ponder the possibilities. Do you know how many billions of dollars are transferred out of this country by individuals, and the fees they incur? So if it’s free, why would RevolutionExchange bother. Well, that brings us to the second product announced today, and a bombshell in itself.

The RevolutionCard is a highly secure alternative to the mag-stripe cards in your wallet and will be accepted using existing point of sale equipment. The RevolutionCard is a PIN based credit card with no visible or physical information on it. The card, of course, carries an APR on balances. It’s pretty novel, but whether or not it will be accepted by the masses is left to be seen.

But if anyone can pull this off it’s the impressive team behind Revolution Money. It’s a who’s who of heavy hitters. Former AOL chairman Steve Case is the main man behind it. AOL Vice Chair emeritus Ted Leonsis will chair the company. Joining him will be former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, former Mastercard CEO Russell Hogg, former Charles Schwab CEO David Pottruck, former Vice Chairman of JPMorgan David Golden, and former CEO of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines. The company recently announced a $50million Series B round from Citi, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and others.

As Case puts it, “we have built an innovative Web 2.0 company based on the latest
technology to disrupt the decades-old system with the goal of offering the
industry’s most accessible, easy-to-use and secure payment system that puts
money back where it belongs, in consumers’ pockets.”

Where do I apply?

Three weeks ago I started getting letters from Certegy explaining that someone was using my name, address, and driver’s license number on fraudulent checks in Houston, Texas. Since I had never been a victim of ID theft (at least that I am aware of), I called Certegy then hit the couch with my laptop in a search for facts.

Wow, what a confusing world! Let me preface this by saying, I’m in the information security field and understand the many forms of ID scams that exist. What I soon realized is that ID Theft is not only a big business for the criminals it has become a big business for legitimate companies. All the estimates we see about the losses incurred by ID theft should include the revenues of the companies offering services to prevent it; insurance, credit monitoring, incident assistance, education, hand holding, account locking, etc. It’s an industry folks! …and a competitive one, at that.

I dove into the details on this one because, many of the financial institutions I work with have considered contracting with one of these companies to offer assistance to their account holders. I wanted to know if these services are worth the money and whether or not this is something the financial institutions should be offering.

After studying the market, the crimes, and methods of protection, prevention, and resolution and as a recent victim, here is my take. ID Theft, card fraud, check fraud, etc is diverse and dynamic. I think these services can be helpful in some cases. Especially, those where the consumer knows nothing about this problem, has no desire to understand it, and has some extra cash laying around. Although that being said, consumers should understand that the services vary. There are good companies and suspect companies offering these services. So you don’t end up with a false sense of “protection” is highly advisable in this case to understand what you are buying. As much as these service providers want you to believe that all you have to do is spend 10 minutes signing up and SHAZAM! Your protected. This is not always the case.

There are differences in these services. There are differences in the costs. Some services I’ve seen offer next to nothing for $9.99 a month. To be honest, you’ll spend just as much time determining what the companies services really are as you would learning how to do this on your own. For free! And folks, it’s very easy to do if you know what to do.

So, do I think a bank or credit union should offer ID theft prevention/response services? Absolutely! I would love to have been able to contact my bank for some assistance. In fact, that is a huge relationship development opportunity that institutions could take advantage of.

Should they contract with one of these service providers? Well, that depends on what the service really is. Third party service provider due diligence comes to mind here! To put it in perspective, there is a widely recognized provider named Lifelock, that is endorsed by many reputable companies and is funded by two top venture capitalists. Google them to open the can of worms they are now dealing with. Would you want your institution’s name behind this company?

I did find a couple providers (which Im not going to name) that offer relatively valuable services. But I think if an institution is going to promote one of these services for a fee, they should also offer up advice on how their account holders can do this stuff on their own. It is really not that hard.

Lastly, nope, I don’t plan to subscribe to one of these services right now.

LendingClub just announced that they surpassed (barely) $1M in loans in their first 100 days of operating on Facebook.

For those of you not too quick with the math, that averages out to be $10,000 per day in loans. Of course, the trajectory is ramping up from $0 on day 1, so if we assume a linear growth trajectory (which given the chart LendingClub put out is pretty accurate), that works out to be $20,000 of loans on day 100. And then more the next day, and the next day, and you get the point.

Let me say that again, $20,000 in loans a day via the new Facebook channel with NO BANK INVOLVEMENT.

One question to think about is did these loans take away from loans that normally would have been done by a bank or credit union ? Or were these loans that would never have made it that far ? There were a total of 172 loans totaling just over $1M. Again, doing the math, the average loan was a little over $6000. This is not chump change, but also not that worthy of a bank getting involved in. Likely alot of these loans just never would have happened prior to the P2P lending phenomenon since the borrower would likely never had approached a bank in the first place.

Currently on LendingClub, there are already 683 registered lenders, meaning they have passed some qualification and know the risks.

Is this something for banks and credit unions to worry about ? Absolutley.

This has the classic tell-tale signs outlined in the great book Innovators Dilemma (by Clayton M. Christensen). The main point behind Innovators Dilemma is that when new things come out, they start small, and are hence universally poo-poo’d by the establish players. In the book, Christensen follows several industries where up and coming technology was ignored by big players because it was just a nit. Well, over a few years, that nit would each their lunch from the bottom up. It’s called a dilemma because the big players are wired to ignore these nits (after all, it may just represent 0.01% of the market at the start). They see the threat, but just can’t imagine it will ever amount to much. And then they get slammed, normally faster than anyone could every have imagined.

I think this LendingClub data should serve as a global wake up call for banks and credit unions. Now once everyone is awake, the next step is figuring out to make your own hay out of the p2p lending phenomenon.

Oh yeah, one more key point from Innovators Dilemma. You’d think a big player could just do the same thing as the small up and comer, and then just use their established place in the market to slam the small player. Ah yes, sounds great, but the problem is the new technology always has a lower cost and smaller margins, meaning the big player with their current business model and expense structure just cannot copy the small player without flat out losing money. And so the slow death spiral begins. If the big player is a 1 market company, this can literally be the beginning of the end. An example is SGI (Silicon Graphics), the vaunted Unix workstation maker of the 1990’s, literally wiped out in a few years by PCs, all the while, SGI thinking “PCs can never be workstations”.