Austin, Texas-based Malauzai‘s online and mobile platforms will now include personal financial management tools. This means that before you pay that bill with a snap of your smartphone camera, you can check what other bills are coming due this week, and how much this will cut into your planned trip to, say, the Bahamas next February.
Malauzai — the name means “little monkey” in Cantonese — announced this morning a partnership with the Braintree, Mass.-based software provider Geezeo to power financial guidance in Malauzai’s app. The solution, which will provide consumers and small businesses with a “comprehensive view of their assets, bills, overall cash flow, goals, and budgets,” will be incorporated into Malauzai’s mobile and online platforms.
Malauzai has more than 350 FI partners, with 400,000+ digital banking users. Geezeo counts about 400 FI partners. Financial details of the Malauzai-Geezeo deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2009 by veterans of Digital Insight, Malauzai has been a leader in delivering mobile functionality in a smooth user experience. Malauzai powered the mobile app that made First Financial Bank in Abilene, Texas, the nation’s first to offer bill pay using the smartphone camera, called PicturePay by Malauzai.
Malauzai took a step closer to offering PFM with some limited functionality for tablet customers about a year ago. But partnering with an established player such as Geezeo must have made more sense then building out its own solution. PFM has taken a beating in the fintech space over the last few years, with survey after survey showing that customers hate budgeting and looking at pie charts.
Cue the launch of PFM 2.0, advice when it’s needed. That means geo-sensitive reminders about offers and goals, and other distributed services delivered in context. This advice is particularly prized by millennials, short on cash and hungry for financial guidance. Geezeo seems to be gearing its offerings to this new world of PFM. Here is part of its announcement of PFM for community banks last August:
Geezeo’s PFM platform offers financial institutions a way to build relationships with customers. It will give FIs and understanding of consumers needs via data and a digital experience. It provides an engaging experience for your customer and makes finance management less of a chore, a chore I personally dislike. If a bank or credit unions online banking users are like me, they want empowerment so they can take more responsibility for their finances.
Providers like Malauzai and Geezeo (and Kasasa for transactional accounts and Continuity for compliance, and many more) have significantly narrowed the gap between the tech offering of the megabanks and community banks. Malauzai has enable fingerprint login, peer-to-peer payments, and a state-of-the-art user experience. It’s hard to see how community banks that fail to follow suit will last long or acquire millennial customers.