FinanceWorks

» see financeworks.intuit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

FinanceWorks is the rare dead product whose users mostly could not have told you its name. It lived one click inside an online banking session, somewhere under a tab, and if your bank or your credit union licensed it then you had it. If they did not, you never saw it existed.

That distribution model is also why it never came anywhere near me. It was sold to American banks and credit unions to put in front of American retail customers. Turkish banks ran their own internet banking and were well regarded for it, so the whole category arrived here by a different road.

Digital Insight wrote it. The company had been founded in California in 1995 to sell online banking software to institutions too small to build their own, and Intuit bought it in a deal that closed in February 2007. FinanceWorks shipped the year after that, free to the customer, hosted at an intuit.com address with quickenweb buried in the path.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it could and could not do ~

It gathered accounts from different institutions into one view and tracked what you spent against a budget you set for yourself. Javelin Strategy and Research named it best in class for online financial management in 2009 and said it set the standard for rivals to match, which from an Intuit property was not much of a surprise. BankInnovation gave it a best technology award the same year.

The gaps were obvious to anyone who had used desktop Quicken. You could not import transactions and you could not reconcile an account. It was a window onto your money with the controls left out.

~ sold with the furniture ~

Intuit put its financial services division up for sale and Thoma Bravo closed on it on 1 August 2013, which restored the Digital Insight name. Five months later NCR agreed to buy the whole thing, completing in January 2014. FinanceWorks went along with each sale.

NCR had spent the 2010s turning a cash-register company into a payments and banking software vendor, and it arrived owning a digital banking stack of its own. FinanceWorks was switched off in 2016. The Intuit host that had served it kept answering into 2018 and then started redirecting instead.

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