Finance Website Trends: UK and U.S.

I continue to monitor the finance website trends in the UK and the U.S. Previous posts are here: One, Two, Three.

There's more tools than ever before to offer you help with your finances. Perhaps the ones we are most aware of are the comparison sites, like moneysupermarket and moneysavingexpert. Google trends reveals that there's more people searching moneysupermarket than radio2. (It would appear that they are bigger than Wogan.) These comparison sites offer consumers the ability to choose between a wide range of financial products.

There’s a multitude of finance blogs out there, I wrote a post above some of the best ones here.

Social lending based on varying kinds of credit unions can be found with such sites as Zopa and Fynanz. These sites offer the ability for customers to lend and borrow money from one another, without the need for banks.

There are sites like Mint, geezo,buxfer, expensr and Wesabe that offer budgeting and more. The model here is of reviewing and making money saving recommendations to customers based on your translational data (you have to first provide these sites access to your bank statements.) This kind of service for aggregating all your banking is now ‘fairly’ common in the U.S. Some interesting one's I found include Pennyminder, Pearbudget, Foonance, moneytrackin. More recently, in the UK, the model has been adopted by kublax.

Online payment services, the most famous of which are paypal and Google Checkout. These sites offer ways to send and receive money online. There’s a few more since the last time that I looked, most notably revolutionmoneyexchange and moneybookers.

Widget wise, there’s not masses. Apart from the iphone app that Mint offer.

Trends:
The web2,0 budgeting sites continue to be used. It appears from Google's search volume index that Mint has actually grown significantly over the last year.

Most of the newer sites are too small to show up with the larger sites. But, Moneybookers appear to be making an impression.

 Zopa and Prosper's growth looks pretty flat year on year.

 

Whilst the search traffic for Google Checkout appears flat, paypal continue to grow steadily.