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The SmartyPig Blog
March 18, 2009 • Posted by Michael FerrariSmartyPig X Southwest
The SmartyPig team hit the road last weekend, headed to South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, and joined in the festivities to spread the word about our being the leader in the social banking space.
SXSW is a conference and festival event for entertainment and related media industry professionals. During the conference, co-founder Mike Ferrari had a chance to speak on a panel with other up-and-coming financial sites. Mike showcased our recent release of OFX integration and spoke of SmartyPig’s rapid growth as one of the most innovative financial websites in global financial services today.
To say the least, the reaction has been terrific! We’ve been all over the online map and in the press regarding how simple and smart it is to use SmartyPig – now even more so after the OFX integration, as we’ve made it even easier for SmartyPig members to track their saving habits beyond SmartyPig.com. Especially in a trying economy, we understand that people want options to help them organize their finances and keep on the right track. With SmartyPig, we can even make the money go farther than ever.
We’re looking forward to the upcoming months and appreciate customer feedback as we grow. We also tip our hat to the SXSW folks for including us at its most successful interactive event ever! The opportunity to speak to so many people about helping save the world by helping the world save has us itching for 2010.
Be sure to look for more exciting news in the next few weeks at SmartyPig, where Saving Will Never be the Same!
Special thanks to:
- Social Times, Kristen Nicole
- LA Times, Dan Frost
- Fast Company, Anya Kamenetz
- Venture Beat, Anthony Ha
- Shankrila.com
SmartyPig Integrates with Personal Finance Software Sites!
We have received a significant number of requests from our customers indicating they want to be able to upload/integrate their SmartyPig account into their preferred financial money management site. Well, starting today you can! SmartyPig now integrates with sites like Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee, Buxfer, Thrive, MoneyStrands and Microsoft Money. Geezeo and Rudder are coming soon.
There were two ways we could have integrated with these online money management sites. One would be to allow these sites to “screen scrape” – a technique in which a computer program extracts data from the display output of a Web page. The key element that distinguishes screen scraping is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user, rather than as input to another program.
The other method would be for us to invest in an OFX (Open Financial Exchange) solution, a unified specification for the electronic exchange of financial data between financial institutions, businesses and consumers via the web. With more than 5,500 financial institutions using OFX, the specification is the most widely adopted open standard for the exchange of financial information between consumers and financial services providers.
We chose to invest in an OFX solution with one of the industry leaders in OFX technology, Access Softek out of Berkley, California.
At SmartyPig we recognize how important it is to securely manage your finances, set goals and help change the mindset of “buy now, pay later.” And being able to aggregate all your accounts in one place is a critical step in taking control of your finances.
Did we miss integrating with your money management site? If so, please let us know!
Mike Ferrari, co-founder
New Updates on SmartyPig!
Wanted to send out a quick note on a couple new updates on the site. Thanks to some great feedback from customers over the past few months, we\’ve gone ahead and made the following exciting enhancements:
You can now download your transaction history from the \”Account Activity\” section of your account. We are offering the download in CSV file format right now. We will be looking to add OFX in the coming months so folks will be able to sync with sites like Mint and Wesabe.
You can also now mark your notifications as \”read\” and also delete them from the notifications section. The notification indicator in the toolbar will only display \”unread\” messages moving forward.
And in an effort to reduce emails into your inbox, we\’ve combined the monthly estatement and savings goal update emails.
Please weigh in here or email our support staff with any ideas, questions or concerns.
Thanks and have a great holiday weekend!
