On the heels of the Mint acquisition, a Bangalore based startup – Perfios – is hoping to replicate some of that success in the Indian market. Perfios is a web based app that helps you consolidate your financial information and provide a single point of view and insight into your finances. You can import data from different sources – for example, import info from your bank accounts, credit cards, mutual funds, equity etc. into Perfios and it helps you monitor and analyse your finances from a single dashboard.
Needless to say, the service has great value (as validated by the Mint acquisition). There might be an initial hurdle of getting users (mainly due to apprehension on part of the users to trust the service), but as users get more comfortable, I do think that Perfios has some solid potential.
The one horribly icky thing about their current site is the ‘Tour’ section, which is an animated powerpoint slideshow and takes foreover to convey its message. They should make this more simpler and get the message across to the users and provide some detailed screenshots of the dashboard as well. If I were a potential customer, I know I’d want to take a peek at that before signing up.
The service is currently invite only, but they should be launching publich pretty soon.
Its an excellent service – have been using for many months and love it. the guys who started it are very high quality folks (the founder of Aztec) and know how to build solid products
Perfios is an excellent product. Availability of complete personal financial information in one screen has never been such a breeze. I am sure more features are coming in.
Can this service pull my account information from my bank directly (assuming I authorize etc of course) ? I was under the impression that Indian banks don’t support (at least as of quite recently) some set of standards (dont recall the name) that are mandatory for US banks that mint.com used to basically pull all the info for a single user across multiple accounts in one place; to provide analytics etc…These standards are read-only so thats somewhat reassuring for finicky folks… How does that work in the perfios case? Do they scrape info by having crawlers/scrapers log in? I wonder how comfortable people are with that..
About the need/convenience for such a service, there is no question! Just simple first order analytics eg how do I spend now compared to say a year ago — is something that my bank doesnt provide me…!
Does it store the password of the user in their database (like mint.com did).
If it stores the password on the servers, i will think twice before putting the details of my bank account with a startup that might or might not exist tomorrow.Mint.com clearly told this thing on their site.Not sure whether perfious mentions it clearly or not.
But i am sure people who donot know of that or are unware of that will start using the service and might get used to it also.Mostly young people would use it that what i think.
i think it does — or rather, it needs to. Else, i dont see a way by which it will be able to pull the needed info.
Yes you are right Pranav.
By the way i had been researching this area lately myself as i had been writing a similar product, but it will run on client machine (offline mode) and it will be free . I am going to launch it from http://www.letthebucksgrow.com (the site doesnot give much details currently) . Seriously need help on improving the overally look and feel, if anybody visiting here wants to join in please ping me at rajat.me@gmail.com. Right now we can upload and parse ICICI transaction in my product and categorize and view graphs.Hopefully might support qix format later.
Hi Rajat and Rakesh,
I have been using Perfios for quite some time now and as expected it took time for me to get convinced on the security and privacy issues. Let me tell you what I have learned from many interaction with them .
They do not store the password on their servers, they have a patent pending technology which actually allows them to encrypt the password on the user’s PC.
I even gave it a try by using another computer for my account, after entering the credentials on my laptop. it did NOT autoupdate, and also a pop told me that I am not using my system!!
You can interact with Aditya (adi@perfios.com), who is the sales/marketing fellow there.
regards, Prasad
Hi All,
Good to see that people are really talking about Perfios. Let me tell u guys, its an amazing website. It has completely automated my accounts, I can forward Mutual Fund and credit card statements, categorize transactions and generate reports like how much did I spend on grocery – compare with last year and many other things!! I have loved it coz its new to me!
I guess, its an invite only service as of now. website has all the details.
~Meghana
@ Prasad and Meghana
it doesnt take long for someone to figure that you’re somehow affiliated with perfios.
nothing wrong with it – but if you publicly make that disclosure with your comment, people will take you more seriously rather than perceiving your comments as spam.
Hi All,
If you have more questions on Perfios, please send me an email, I would be glad to answer all of them – adi@perfios.com.
I have used Perfios in the past, but somehow it does not feel secure. I even contacted them thorough feed back mail with some security related queries.
No response from them till date. Not a good sign.
Rajesh,
Sorry, we did not see your mail. Must have missed it somehow. There is no doubt that one has to be extremely careful about what one discloses on the web and more so if one has to use one’s financial institution’s credentials. Perfios has highlighted its security model in its site as well as its application (surely, we need to talk a lot more). To reiterate…unlike many online sites, we DO NOT store any financial institution credentials on our server. All userids and password are encrypted and stored locally on the user’s machine. To protect your privacy, we do not ask anything more than an email id and the same is not shared with anyone. The data stored in your account is protected and accessed (not viewed) only for the perpose of taking backups. A user is free to take out all the data he has, in an excel format, delete his accounts and walk out any time she wants. That is the level of transparency and flexibility we would like to provide for our users.
Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Perfios.
Regards
–Santhosh
guys, look at adviceamerica.com , fantastic product, citibank is using that big time.