Yodlee unveils platform to help banks 'innovate like Google' (exclusive)

Yodlee is working to break financial information out of their digital vaults and put it in the hands of its owners.

Yodlee powers personal financial management solutions for 600 major banks and finance portals. Today the 14-year old company announced that it has launched ACE (Active Commerce Exchange), an ecosystem of financial applications that banks can easily integrate and resell to their customers.

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“It has historically been hard for banks to innovate because of the heavy regulatory overlay,” said chef strategy and development offer Joseph Polvevari in an interview with VentureBeat. “A major trend now is that banks are embracing innovation, and we give them a platform that lets them speed these ideas to market. ACE means banks can iterate and innovate like Google.”

Yodlee has partnered with 20 forward-thinking financial services companies across different vertical markets, within the financial services space. The full list (below) includes personal finance security app Billguard, and FutureAdvisor, which provides data-driven, personalized investment advice.

Banks faced some epic failures during the recession and lost the trust of many consumers. This set off a wave of entrepreneurs building technology that could make the financial industry more transparent and accessible to consumers.

Polvevari said that Yodlee’s bank partners were asking it for ways to get back on track. They wanted to get their customers’ trust back and satisfy their needs, as well as keep them engaged.

Banks looking for new revenue sources and/or to offer more services to their customers can use Yodlee’s platform to integrate these financial applications more quickly, using fewer resources. Since Yodlee is already installed in hundreds of financial organizations, the regulatory and security qualifications are taken care of, and there is already a distribution channel set up.

“There is a high demand for platform and infrastructure technology that does not exist in financial services,” Polvevari said. “We want banks to move as fast as the Internet moves, and our goal is to continue building the worlds’ greatest developer community around financial services. This is a core service — it’s where your money is and what you do with it. We want the brightest developer minds on the problem.”

There are 750 developers currently on the platform. Polvevari said the API set is interesting because it allows all the applications to run from a common codebase, that portable across channels and mediums. This simplifies development and API calls.

Yodlee launched FinApps in 2010 which gave third-party developers the power to develop apps that can secure access financial data. ACE is a continuation of this effort. Participating apps include: BillGuard.  BIM, ExecuPay, FreeAgent, FutureAdvisor, LivePlan, miiCard, Narrative Science, PaySimple, Planwise, Shoeboxed, Tallie/SpringAhead, TipRanks, TouMetis, WilliamPaid, Xero, Xignite.

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Yodlee is based in Redwood City, California and has raised over $100 million in funding from Accel Partners, Warbug Pincus, and others.