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

Caveman 1: Hey, I have an idea, let’s build a structure over by the lake, we can call it a “house” and live in it, it’ll be great.

Caveman 2: That’s silly, how will you keep the rain out ? What about wind ? I like my cave the way it is, thank you very much, hmphh.

And so began an age old pattern of nay sayers who don’t get anything new. That is of course until they start using that very something and then completely forget they were nay sayers in the first place.

2000 years later:

Caveman 2: Let’s invited the Grog’s over to our house, we can show off our new game room.

And so it goes with the brilliant follower post that just showed up on the normally excellent NetBanker blog, where a guest blogger is convinced that nobody wants personal financial management software online, that any efforts in that direction are just a big fat waste of time, that everyone is deluded in thinking that PFM online will ever “make a difference”, and that we should all just grow up. Strange post indeed on a blog that also awarded a best of the web award to online PFM company Wesabe. Oh, before you go off and say “but wesabe is not PFM, it’s social banking”, I say it is PFM with social features.Remember the gold old late 90’s ? Back before “everything” was online, and credit card number security was the big topic of the day?

As always, there were 2 kinds of people in the financial industry back then. We’ll call them the leaders and the followers. If you asked the leaders about the prospect of online banking, they would have told you about endless possibilities, a change in the very nature of how people perceive banking, the power of putting people closer to their money, and on and on.

If you asked the followers, they would have talked about security problems, poor broadband penetration, not enough homes have computers, custumers like going to a branch, and on and on.

And so it is with just about every technology. The followers perpetually just don’t get it (at least until “it” is nibbling at their toe). Whether it’s mobile phones, CDs, color television, or cars, there is always a large group of followers that will poo poo the idea in the early stages.

Of course, the reason I called these people followers and not “something else”, is because they do eventually catch on. One day, when it seems like everyone around them is doing something, they just change there minds one morning and now embrace the something. This is usually accompanied by compete amnesia about every not getting it in the first place, kind of a primal self preservation instinct of some sort.

disclosure: Andrew Taylor is a principal of the company Jwaala, which creates a quicken like product for banks and credit unions.