VB Interview #9 - Peter Hazlehurst, SVP Product Management at Yodlee (Finovate 07)

I must admit that the first time I had ever heard of Yodlee, aka "the Account Aggregation company", was on Jim's NetBanker. Mainly because they haven't been targeting Europe so far. They are making good progress internationally though, in countries like India.

As far as I am concerned, Yodlee's presentation given by Peter HazleHurst, SVP Product Management, was one of the best ones at Finovate. Peter is a very good speaker: he knows the industry extremely well, and he has a good sense of humour.

Yodlee was known as the account aggregation company. But Peter and his colleagues have worked hard to change that perception of the company. Yodlee is a full-service financial tools provider.

Their clients are large US banks and credit unions, but they plan to target the small financial institutions soon with future large distribution deals.
The US is their core market, but they are focusing more and more on their international growth and the interface is now available in English, French, Spanish and Chinese. Peter just come back from a trip to France...

Their flagship product, the award winning MoneyCenter used by banks such as BoA, offer account opening, bill payment, funds transfer, personal finance management and long-term archives.

They leverage the web 2.0 "technologies" like AJAX to make people's lives easier and provide an intuitive interface. Their transaction journal and their financial calendar are two excellent examples of good usage of web 2.0.

Currenty, the registration rate for their personal finance management tool is one new user every 2 seconds; they currently have over 3 million users (October 2007).

Interview with Peter Hazlehurst

 

Comments

[Rakesh]

Hi,

I found your blog a very good source of information. It is very informative!

I am a student at the Columbia University of NY and currently doing a research paper on the subject of mobile banking. I am of the firm belief that Mobile banking is there to stay and is definitely beginning to gain traction in the United States.

For that matter I also came across a lot of vendors providing solutions in the mobile banking space in the process of doing my research. And when I look it from the vendors point of view how do I take into account the risk involved in these investments. I want to know how vendors of mobile banking such as mfoundry, firethorn, obopay and the host of other new players entering the market are able to justify there investments. In particular what kind of discount factor or cost of capital do they go with when venturing into creating solutions for mobile banking considering that mobile banking has still not started to generate any substantial revenue for banks.

I would appreciate your advice and suggestions in helping me solve this puzzle.

Thanks,
Rakesh
[email protected]