Egg’s service should be a success. It is already the UK’s largest online bank, so it has the customers and mindshare to win a large slice of the fast-growing account aggregation market. ‘Money Manger’ will also help Egg to boost revenues per customer, upselling higher-margin services to its 1.4 million credit-card-only clients.
Egg is to launch ‘Money Manager’, an account aggregation service.
UK online bank Egg plans to introduce ‘Money Manager’, a new account aggregation service. Datamonitor estimates that 35 million European consumers will be using account aggregation services by 2005, and Egg hopes to cash in on this market’s buoyant future.
The service will allow Egg customers to manage all of their financial accounts with all of the UK’s key financial service providers through a single webpage, via their PC. Account aggregation has proved popular in the US, where several million consumers currently use similar services.
Online financial service providers are the best-placed candidates to entice people to use account aggregation. Part of the reason is that they already have online customers and can cross-sell them aggregation services. In addition, the success of account aggregation depends on trust, and banks are generally considered trustworthy.
Egg does particularly well on both these grounds. Almost three quarters of its 2.1 million customers only have a credit card at present; if it can sign them up for aggregation too, it stands a greater chance of selling its other products. Since 11% of Europeans have tried to change financial services supplier but pulled out because it proved too difficult, this represents a clear opportunity for Egg to win more savings and personal loan business.
People often worry that aggregating accounts could be risky, with the ‘all in one basket’ approach making it easy for fraudsters to access all their finances at once. However, Egg will give Money Manager customers a guarantee that if they encounter any fraud on any of their accounts (whether eEgg or non-Egg), the company will accept full responsibility; this should help overcome people’s fears.
Egg is already the largest online bank in Europe. This account aggregation offering should help it both increase its customer base, and increase its revenue per customer.
Related research: Datamonitor, 2002: Account aggregation: the right way forward?
