Amongst the wired avant-garde, there has been a fair bit of buzz around new services like Yodlee which can manage data from a user’s personal bank accounts, email accounts, phone bills, etc. These services have sometimes been called password managers or metabrowsers, but as account aggregation develops, it really goes beyond browsing. It’s the ability to “pull” data from a variety of disparate sources that is really going to change the way we interact with our service providers in an online environment.

More importantly, as Dinesh Sheth, CEO of Memphis-based account aggregation firm uMonitor, points out, we need to be able to take action on the information we call up, preferably in a way that is integrated with the device we’re using to view the info.

Many consumers know of portals like AOL and Yahoo! as masters of aggregation. That is, they can grab content from a variety of sources such as stock quotes, news headlines, users’ personal calendars and personal interests, etc., and customize it into a useful format. Infrastructure providers like Infospace and Tibco have often been facilitators of such processes.

So it should be no surprise that many observers think that AOL and Yahoo! will be key distribution points for a much more sophisticated form of aggregation. It’s one thing to pull together stock quotes from your Yahoo! portfolio; it’s quite another to be able to view and take action on your phone bill, brokerage accounts, bank accounts, etc.

As it stands now, Yahoo! is at the early stages of rolling out account monitoring and bill payment services. They’re currently advertising a service which would allow users to transfer funds to their bank accounts to their brokerage accounts – handy for those margin calls.

But it seems as if it’s a bit of a patchwork at the moment. Many users use PayPal to move money and pay bills. And increasingly, financial institutions offer bill payment through their own web-based bank account services.

Talking with Mr. Sheth, the real power of account aggregation becomes apparent. Over time, users will be able to operate a much broader range of services from their unified accounts. Being able to perform such tasks on a mobile device is becoming increasingly important to business users. Mr. Sheth pointed out that the limited keyboards and screen sizes of phones and PDA’s make it tricky to surf and check accounts using traditional surfing methods. Account aggregators will potentially be the saving grace of mobile devices, because users can set up their accounts and populate them with the correct tracking numbers and alert triggers using a regular terminal at home or office, instructing the service to pull data to the unified account.

In the wireless environment, be it on a Palm, Qualcomm phone, or RIM handheld, it now becomes a question of going into the already-unified “aggregated” account, and scrolling through a menu. Want to set up an email account that you designate for very urgent messages from the boss and a few friends? Why not? You could tie just this email into your aggregated account, and monitor only this, so you aren't too distracted with reams of email while you're mobile with a PDA. (Shortly after this conversation, I noticed that my own mobile provider, Bell Mobility, was about to roll out a web-based interface that will help customers set up their phone's mobile browser menus from their desktop environment. Some users will really take advantage of the customization this allows. It's just too cumbersome to surf with a phone without pre-set menus. Geez, most users still have trouble deciding which ring tone to use.)

In other words, this truly personal portal takes on more powerful dimensions than the previous generation of portals promised. If the aggregation services unfold as Mr. Sheth hopes, they’ll go beyond looking at favorite stock symbols, movie times, and sports scores, and into checking on package delivery, bank balances, and flight departure times in a highly personalized way. From browsing and surfing to metabrowsing and taking action.

So where does this leave Yahoo and AOL? Industry observers such as AmericanBanker.com feel that the leading online services will be vital in pushing the new functionality out to end users. A surprising percentage of advanced users currently do enjoy checking out their bank balances at major portals as opposed to going directly to their bank’s web site. (Not me, though. I'm chicken. I let my bank tell me what to do, and how to do it.) If the major portals are doing their job, this is as it should be. The experts in presenting data in a customizable and actionable format should be the major portal companies, and those with whom they subcontract to provide increasingly advanced aggregation services.

Mr. Sheth suggested a variety of online applications that will become available under the aegis of online accounts. Some still sound futuristic to me, since we’ve been seemingly talking about this sort of thing since the early 1980’s: home monitoring (sprinkler systems, babycams); satellite-linked auto repair scheduling based on computerized sensors inside a car; and so on. We may not see widespread adoption of such esoteric functionality anytime soon. But clearly, if we can organize a single account to let us know via wireless alert that we’ve left the oven on when we’re 50 miles into a 3-week vacation, we’d probably be interested in signing up.

It’s not a huge market yet; nor is it a small one. Industry analysts have projected the total number of users of account aggregation to exceed 22 million by 2003.

A recent article on AmericanBanker.com asks: “Will consumers choose to pull together all their finances under the auspices of a bank, or will they do so with one of the three main nonbank Internet portals - America Online, Yahoo, and Microsoft Network?” Robert Sterling, an analyst at Jupiter Communications, is quoted as saying the banks have a leg up on the portals, because consumers place more trust in banks, and banks have more ability to do things like move money and offer personalized financial information.

But the trends, and the insights of aggregation experts like Mr. Sheth, suggest that users may eventually use aggregators, or the portals which license their technology, to circumvent the shortcomings and inconveniences of the originating data providers and account providers. Users are having no trouble today making payments and moving money through fledgling services such as PayPal. And while the banks and other financial institutions which will be key elements of our personalized portals may have the best access to our data, they are not in the aggregation business. Companies like Infospace and Openwave are vital, for example, in the process of ensuring that data viewed on mobile devices is in a usable, consistent format.

Anyone who has tried to check their bank balance or credit card statement online – or even watched as a bank employee with full access had trouble bringing up needed information on an account – would agree that the steady product improvement and skill in data manipulation that can be provided by the major portals like AOL and Yahoo would be attractive to many consumers. Portals, to many, feel a lot friendlier and work a lot better than the kinds of access supported by the originating information providers and institutions. After all, does your bank account send you an alert when the balance drops below the no-fee level? Umonitor’s service is rolling out an alert function just like this (coming soon). Financial institutions would be more likely to resist, not support, this level of consumer convenience. As has happened time and again, online info aggregators provide consumers with a way to make an end run around current monopolies and hoarders of information. Umonitor is no Napster, but yes, it is just a tiny bit subversive.

Currently AOL is working with Yodlee on its account aggregation service; Yahoo is working with Vertical One. Since Yodlee and Vertical One have agreed to merge, this puts rivals like uMonitor in second place. It might also be a bad development for consumers seeking to push the envelope to the fullest level of convenience possible.

The portal business isn’t for the faint of heart. While Yahoo! and AOL surge ahead, also-rans like Excite and holding companies like Lycos must be concerned when their online offerings suddenly look stale and uncoordinated. Full-time dedicated aggregators are going to play an increasingly vital role in allowing portals to live up to their promise of added convenience for consumers. “We know that these technologies are going to be adopted in the marketplace,” says Mr. Sheth. “We just hope that uMonitor will be an important part of it.”