Account aggregation giant Yodlee has launched a new SME-focused service.
Yodlee, the US account aggregation technology provider, has teamed up with software firm OneCore to tackle the business market. The new solution extends the functionality of Yodlee’s consumer-oriented products allowing small businesses to act upon aggregated information.
At present, two million US consumers use account aggregation services, compared to just 100,000 consumers in Europe (the largest proportion of which use eBankinter’s service in Spain and Citibank’s service in the UK). Yodlee is the leading account aggregation technology provider, supporting more than 100 clients and more than five million accounts.
The move into business-oriented account aggregation is a bold one, seeking to combine account aggregation with specialized small business applications. Yodlee will offer business users the opportunity to display their financial accounts on a single web page; receive statements of personal and business account information; be notified of business account information; and to download online financial data which they will be able to integrate with business accounting software packages. The service will be installed onsite rather than externally hosted.
Account aggregation’s future may lie in business rather than consumer-facing services, as it may have more to offer business users than it does consumers. It’s not clear that many consumers have financial affairs that are sufficiently complicated to gain utility from using account aggregation. Some would go so far as to say that account aggregation is a solution searching for a problem rather than vice-versa.
Such arguments are clearly less relevant for a business-oriented account aggregation service than they are for a consumer-oriented service. Yodlee and OneCore may therefore be on to a winner.
