PFMs, and Pageonce Specifically, Need Access to Data — and They’re Losing It

Pageonce is starting to get blocked by some owners of personal financial data, Bank Innovation has learned.

The problem with personal financial management, or PFM, is that it needs all of a customer’s data to be truly worthwhile. But now holders of some consumer PFM data have begun to prevent Pageonce, which aims to provide worthwhile PFM, from incorporating their data into the Pageonce service.

We found at least one data source — American Airlines’s frequent flyer program (see image below) — that is actively blocking Pageonce mobile from adding data into the Pageonce service. This is bad news for Pageonce, which has raised a total of $23 million of venture funding to date. The whole point of the Pageonce service is to allow consumers to consolidate their financial data into one application. This obviously puts a wrinkle in that value proposition.

We asked Pageonce to comment on the American Airlines situation (we presume, but cannot verify, that other PFM data sources are blocking Pageonce, too). Pageonce did not respond to our request.

We have been vocal about the data-centric shortcomings of PFM. Analysts have lamented the lackluster consumer adoption of PFM to date, blaming various market factors for the dispassion for the personal finance tool. Our position is that as long as a PFM application cannot incorporate all of a consumer’s data, the PFM app holds less-than-sufficient utility to that consumer.

In Pageonce, which launched in 2008, we saw a PFM app that seemed to be able to overcome this hurdle of adoption. Now we are not so sure.

Pageonce employs 35 people and is based in Palo Alto, Calif., but was founded in Israel, according to Crunchbase.