It seems Jason Knight, the CEO of Wesabe (the social network meets Quicken service) likes to say that Wesabe does not compete with banks and credit unions. Sure, Wesabe is not competing for deposit dollars or loans, the bread and butter of banks and credit unions. But Wesabe is competing for the users attention and eyeballs, certainly a hot commodity these days.

If someone is using Wesabe to look at the account data from bank XYZ, then that means they are not using bank XYZ’s website, which means bank XYZ is missing out on chances to market to their own customer! What’s more, bank XYZ slowly fades away in importance, just becoming an “institution” in Wesabe. This is call commodization, and it is’nt pretty for banks and credit unions.

And did I say Wesabe is not competing for loan dollars? This is pure speculation on my part, but it certainly makes sense. What do you get when you combine the social/community/budgeting aspects of Wesabe, with the peer 2 peer lending aspects of sites like Zopa, Prosper, and LendingClub? Well, I think you get Wesabe competing directly with banks and credit unions. If I had to guess where Wesabe is channeling some of their VC cash, this would be it.

disclosure: Andrew Taylor is a principal of Jwaala

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under social networking, pfm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.