Geezeo Mobile is the first in a suite of mobile financial applications aimed at the 18 - 35 and student demographic. The new application Geezeo Mobile lets you check you banking balance on the go.
To get started, you can sign into Geezeo by setting up an account with them, or using your existing Gmail user name and password. Once logged in, you can add your various bank accounts to your profile. Unfortunately this requires you to hand over your banking credentials to this new startup out of Framingham, Massachusetts (Banks haven’t caught on to read/write privileges yet). The system seems to cover accounts for every financial institution I’ve heard of, from Bank of America to even the smaller credit unions. They have a good screencast here.
Once your accounts are added, the system will be able to grab the latest balances of from your accounts. To access your balances on your mobile phone, you must first register your phone by texting Geezeo and a registration key to 41411. After registration, you can retrieve your balance simply by texting Geezeo to 41411.
Geezeo is runs on Ruby on Rails, Amazon’s S3, and EC2 web services. Their planned revenue model is deliver contextual product advertisements. They also have plans to expand their services into credit cards, mortgages, car loans, student loans, and brokerages.
Geezeo joins a few other finance 2.0 companies on the web, such as Buxfer and Billmonk, which was acquired by Obopay.
Just tried it out… VERY COOL… I just checked my paypal, bank of america, and american express card balances in one text message. Thanks for the tip…
I do not know if I would trust this, if only because as techcrunch announced a few months ago, 41411 is part of textmarks.com, a site that allows anyone to create a twitter-like automated message system. this sort of lowers credibility to me. i also wonder if they empty all the bank accounts of their subscribers on december 31, 2007 or something, if you’re all responsible for giving the information away and permission to access the account…. bank account is the one place i don’t want to play around.
I’m with brett on this one - surely if you hand over the login to your bank account, the bank will immediately refuse all responsibility and protection for any fraud which might happen on it? I’m not sure i’d be willing to give that up in exchange for an SMS with my balance…
Great post. OK, so I am little biased ;) I am one of the co-founders of Geezeo.
Brett/Raddedas - thanks for raising the security questions. As we are dealing with peoples financial accounts security is paramount. Let me provide more insight into how our system works - hopefully this will set some of your security concerns at ease. Here is an overview of our system:
1. you create an account with Geezeo
2. Geezeo generates a username/pw for you to use with our partner, CashEdge. We DO store this username and password. Whenever we need to update your account balances, we send a secured request to Cash Edge over an encrypted channel (ssl).
3. At this point, Cash Edge makes the request out to your bank and they send us your updated information. Any and all informational transactions with your bank are handled by CashEdge. We display the resulting information. We even filter sensitive info out of our log files so that not even our developers or our system administrators will ever know your username and password. That information is never stored at Geezeo.
It’s worth noting that Cash Edge’s aggregation service is used by some of the largest financial institutions (ex. Vanguard). They are a fantastic company and a great partner. Their customers include 5 of the top 10 US Banks and 4 of the top 10 brokers.
If anyone wants more information on Geezeo’s security policies or product plans please drop us a line.
Shawn
I just tried out Geezeo Mobile and it worked like a gem. Within seconds, I had a text message back with all my up to date account balances. Great idea guys, and good luck with future Geezeo updates, looking forward to them!
I gave Geezeo a whirl and I’m glad that I did. It is so convenient to be able to access all of your balances in moments. I think that this will really help me with getting a better grasp on my finances. I look forward to updates and new innovations from Geezeo.
Geezeo - Congrats on your successful beta launch of a great service.
I have used contractors in other countries and it impressed me that they could get balance info on their cell phone. It bugged me that I do not have this capability here in US. Now I can check my balance anytime. Thanks Geezeo