Infomagination

Make sense of your money with Kublax.com

The best presentations you can give, I always think, aren't just the ones where you teach the audience something, but where they teach you something too.  So, during my recent talk to the Financial Services Forum it was with great delight that I learned of Kublax.com, thanks to the marvellous David Lundholm of BGL Group Ltd (the guys behind Compare the Market, amongst other things).

Kublax is a fantastic, free, online financial management/budgeting tool that plugs what I've long seen as a big gap in e-banking services - the ability for you to analyse the data your bank holds on your money.  As I wrote in my paper: 

 "With consumers set to take ever greater interest in their own data, brands need to start giving them access to their information, together with the tools to explore.  Why doesn’t HSBC help me carry out some simple financial analysis when I use their internet banking, so I can manage my money better? "

Thankfully, the good news is that I don't need to hang around for my bank to get its arse in gear any more - and neither do you.  With its secure encryption system (it uses the same tech as the banks), its easy to pull up data from all your accounts through Kublax, so you can view all your money as one.  You can then get an easy overview of not just your incomings and outgoings, but what you're spending your money on (with automatic catagorisation) and even how your expenditure compares to similar users.  Here's a couple of examples from my account (with some of the exact figures removed for modesty :)

 

   

So far, Kublax has one month's worth of my data.  Where it's really going to get interesting is once I've been using it for a year or so and patterns & anomolies start to emerge.  I'll also begin building a picture of myself through my transaction history.  In a funny way, the proportions in that pie chart up there say something about me as a person.  These days, as I said in this earlier post, data doesn't just report on what you do, it tells you who you are.

Aside from awareness, and being bothered to take the simple steps to set up your account, the main problem I think Kublax has is trust.  It may say SECURE in big letters and have plenty of security accreditations and plaudits from reputable sources, but it's hard not to feel a twinge of doubt as you type in your internet banking ID and that secure code that your bank have told you NEVER to give out to anyone (even them!). 

The solution for me would be for Kublax to either integrate its tech into existing e-banking software ("Kublax Inside") or arrange a spot of co-marketing, in partnership with the banks.  For me, that'd be a real win-win-win situation.  Kublax gets credibility, the banks look like the good guys for introducing people to this handy free tool and their customers get a new way to manage their money better, at a time when cashflow is a real issue for plenty of people. 

Until that day, why not get ahead of the game?  Grab yourself a Kublax account and take control of your finances for yourself.

Big Brother is watching Amazon Kindle users

In a moment of irony that would have made George Orwell laugh (or cry), owners of Amazon's Kindle (the electronic book reader) have recently had copies of Orwell's e-books deleted from their gadgets without their knowledge, after Amazon discovered they'd come from a seller that didn't have proper distribution rights.

Unsurprisingly, the people affected are none too impressed by the whole affair, which has left Amazon looking uncharacteristically ignorant of its customers' feelings.  Still, at least the site has realised this and announced that it will be altering its policy so that it can block illegal e-books, but not take back copies innocently downloaded by customers. 

This sounds like a good plan to me.  After all, whilst people are generally happy for companies to use their data for their benefit, anything that feels like an intrusion of privacy can damage the precious trust on which those relationships depend.  As Orwell might say, if he were here now:

Thanks to Jonathan for putting me on to the story.  You can read the full thing here.

The panic and promise of mobile location data

 

This is the first thing I read on my way to work today.  Not only has a rather fetching young man/lady just set the record for the youngest ever sex change, but Google is putting a "spy" in my pocket.  Bejesus!  On the one hand I'm heartened that broader acceptance of gender issues has led to at least one confused young person finding happiness, on the other I'm disappointed in the continued sensationalisation that characterises reporting around personal information.  What a morning!

To give you a quick summary of the story, basically Google Latitude is piece of software that allows users to track their friend's whereabouts in 27 countries worldwide once they've installed in on their phone.  Users will have to sign up to the service and can agree to give contacts their precise location, their city or no details.  Only the most recent information is given and none of the information is stored.  Interesting, but not actually new.  Yahoo! Fire Eagle has been doing all that stuff for a while now.  Followus is a whole service dedicated to offering parents and companies the option to track their kids/workers using their mobile phone data.

What the newspaper reports seem to miss is how useful this kind of information could be to the people.  Aside from making meeting up with your mates much easier, once you don't have to tell your phone where you are, then it can quite easily tell you how to get somewhere else, or where the nearest pubs or places of interest are near you.  It could also help you with your shopping, find you a nearby cab, or facilitate real world gaming.  The reason many people are so worried about sharing information is because they don't realise what the benefits will be.  As this chart from the Institute for Insight in the Public Services shows, however, once people know that they'll be getting better service in return then perceptions of data sharing change dramatically.

Data is an unsettling, scary world for a lot of people, but whilst being wary of the issues around supplying personal information we shouldn't forget the benefits that it can bring.  For brands, the lesson is to be clear and up front about what kind of information you're gathering, how it will be stored and how people will benefit as a result.  Only then will people realise that if Google are putting a spy in your pocket, it's only so he can work for you.