SA bank takes personal financial management online

INDUSTRY

Yodlee today announced a partnership with South African bank Nedbank to power personal financial management (PFM) solutions for their customers throughout South Africa and in their offshore locations.

Nedbank's MyFinancialLife™ online offering is now available and, via Yodlee's account aggregation technology, consumers can calculate their net worth, analyze spending, budget, save for goals and more. Nedbank is Yodlee's first financial institution partner in South Africa, breaking new ground in providing personal financial management solutions to customers directly from a bank.

"PFM is a relatively new concept in South Africa, but we have seen rapid adoption and consumer acceptance of aggregation-powered money management services," said Bill Parsons, head of global sales at Yodlee. "Through partnerships with leading institutions like Nedbank, we're getting significant traction in South Africa and are thrilled to bring smart PFM tools to over five million more consumers."

Yodlee's account aggregation technology links account information from banks and non-banking service providers in a highly-secure environment. Nedbank's MyFinancialLife is a flexible, free PFM solution for individuals, families and micro-businesses.

At launch, MyFinancialLife™ provides six main functions to users, who can customize their dashboard in line with their individual financial interests & requirements:

• 'net worth calculation' – consolidated view of your financial position, based on financial accounts linked or non-financial assets added manually; for Nedbank clients this will be pre-populated for most Nedbank accounts.
• 'spend analysis' - graphical depiction of spend based on the categorized card and electronic transactions. Initially a manual intervention, the system will automatically recognize all your transactions repeated with the same supplier.
• 'budgeting' – budgeting functionality that allows you to track your actual spend against your planned spend.
• 'saving for a goal' – a goal-save tool that allows you to set goals, categorise them, choose an amount you would like to save during a specific timeframe - and then calculates how much should be put aside to meet your goal – such as saving for a holiday, education or buying a new car.
• 'alerts' - alerts, set on budgeting or goal-save functions according to individual needs, to be  sent via e-mail or SMS. You can, for instance, set up alerts when 50% of your allowed credit card limit has been reached or when you have exceeded a budgeted amount on a specific spend category
• 'calendar view' – allows you to track debit orders against payments that need to be made, making it easy to view weekly, monthly or yearly transactions, ensuring that you have always planned to have sufficient funds available.

"At Nedbank, we're committed to empowering South Africans to achieve their financial goals. Secure, easy-to-use PFM tools that provide insight into one's full financial picture are essential to consumers' financial fitness," said Ingrid Johnson, Group Managing Executive Retail and Business Banking at Nedbank.  "Yodlee helps make PFM a seamless, highly-secure experience for consumers at all stages of financial life."