Balancion: After a month
Balancion is a Finnish start-up that has been hyped quite a bit, and true, they come with good pedigree. I got invited to the service a while back and now have had time to use it for a month or so. The premise is simple, they will provide users a service that will kick Mint.com and rudder.com in their respective behinds.
In a nutshell: Balancion looks around your accounts, downloads the transactions to the service and “analyzes” them. Here’s my four points and issues after the first month of use.
1. Excellent customer service
Not many start-ups are this proactive in community management, even though it might be one of the most important things to do (after your product, that is). I even got a call from a guy from Balancion after we’d swapped a few messages in Twitter. Turns out the guy was the CEO of the company, Jussi Muurikainen (@jupander). During my trials I also had a problem where my bank had changed something in their process leading to a failed process and the java-hack they use to download the account information failed on itself. I tweeted about the issue and they fixed it in a few days.
Of course, they have to have brilliant customer service. They’re playing with our financial information and even a minor dent in their armor might cause distrust and could kill the service before it ever manages to even lift off. That is the main risk factor they face and it explains their slow pace in development – Jussi said they’ve been thinking of this technology since 2002 – way before Mint and the other players came to existence.
2. There’s not very much to do there
Literally, you can do three things in Balancion at the moment – you can upload your account information, sort them in categories and look at your incoming and outcoming money charts. That’s it.
Of course, the big question is that should there be anything else? Sure, some future estimations and saving planning or something similar might be cool, but that’s the main beef. Seeing how much money you have and where you have spent it. Which leads us to ..
3. Categorizing is a bitch
The categories are the most time-consuming thing in Balancion at this moment. The service uses some kind of übermind to artificially intelligenticize the transactions which are sometimes hard to understand even for a human. Let’s take an example with McDonalds: One would think that when you buy a Big Mac from McD’s, the receipt would say “McDonalds Corporation -3.95″ or whatever they cost – and the same logic would be in your bank transactions as well.
No. Thanks to franchising.
There are about a million different companies running franchised companies and since they don’t have to think about a brand or a name for their company they usually have very, very retarded names that require Googling like Sherlock Holmes to figure out what the hell this transaction is from “Alabama 1234″ and it turns out to be a local supermarket run by an entrepreneur instead of a retail chain.
4. Is it worth the money?
There was a questionnaire done by Balancion to its users, asking about basic usage stuff and then came to the interesting part – would you be willing to pay for using Balancion?
That is a very good question. During my month’s trial, I have updated my account information three times and visited the service under ten times – just because there is nothing to do in the service and it doesn’t currently give me any information I don’t already know about.
The current version I probably wouldn’t pay, but with added (useful) features, I just might – but even there, not more than 5-10 euros a month. Even 10 euros is stretching it, because I think a premium Spotify account would be better justified.
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