Hearst Corp. is adding its own touch to two online banking trends — eliminating paper and adding budgeting tools — with Manilla.com.
The soon-to-be-launched product combines aspects of a personal financial management tool for organizing accounts with document management and storage. Industry observers said it is a novel approach for a traditional media company, many of which have been pressed to stay relevant in the face of declining readership and plummeting advertising sales.
With Manilla, experts say Hearst could easily blend its content, the functions of its PFM tool and document storage, thereby building stronger relationships with its existing and potential audiences. Hearst is also tapping a trend of outsiders offering financial services that were formerly the exclusive purview of banks.
"Hearst has a lot of content that it could bring to bear here," said Andrew Frank, vice president of media research for Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. "Publishers like Hearst are looking for more ways to increase their engagement with users, who are spending more time with them on connected devices."
A Hearst spokesman said the company is not prepared to speak about Manilla.com. The spokesman said beta testing would begin later in the first quarter.
Hearst publishes 15 daily and 38 weekly newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle, and luxury magazines for men and women including Esquire and Cosmopolitan. A site like Manilla could make better use of the time consumers are spending at Hearst publications online and it could create more inventory to sell advertisements, Frank said.
Emmett Higdon, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst, said Manilla might be Hearst's attempt to begin creating a comprehensive consumer website that could potentially package content and community with an electronic portal where consumers can have bills delivered, make payments and store important documents.
"Hearst certainly brings strong consumer assets to the table for content and marketing," Higdon said. "But if they can succeed here more than the banks or a third-party provider like Fiserv remains to be seen."
A number of independent vendors have launched similar tools in recent months that work like virtual vaults for document storage. Doxo Inc., a Seattle company that began offering its product in October, lets consumers store statements from any biller virtually, while also receiving communications from billers about their accounts. It recently announced a bill-payment function as well.
Steve Shivers, Doxo's co-founder and chief executive, said his company used a model similar to the cloud storage system offered by Dropbox Inc. "There is a segment of users who will use this as a file cabinet equivalent to organize their information," he said. About 15% of consumers are paperless, though they have contact with roughly 25 to 30 companies on average.
"Doxo is focused on this paperless adoption gap," Shivers said.
Similarly in January, Pitney Bowes Inc. launched a service called Volly that lets consumers view and store bills and statements as well as receive marketing communications from designated companies.
Bernie Gracy, vice president of business development and operations for Volly, said in an e-mail, "consumers want less complexity … not more." Gracy said that while he thinks banks provide a good experience around consolidated payments, "The role of Pitney Bowes as a third party has been to build a consumer lifestyle experience that manages a broad spectrum of content — bills, statements, coupons, catalogs, warranties … as well as to make payments from numerous financial sources."
Stessa Cohen, Gartner's research director for banking industry advisory services, said that by offering free document storage, Manilla was one-upping banks. "It is tedious to do from a bank, and they charge you for it," she said.
A number of banks have started to offer virtual safe-deposit vaults for important customer documents. Among them is Wells Fargo & Co. of San Francisco, whose vSafe product lets businesses and consumers upload documents and records for a monthly fee, according to the bank's website.
Others said they thought it was potentially a good idea to combine document storage and PFM, which are considered separate services by many in the financial world.
Nicole Sturgill, a research director at TowerGroup in Needham, Mass., said a small percentage of third-party online banking and PFM vendors offered document storage as well, but few banks use those services. "We will see more and more of this," she said.
Sturgill said financial institutions have been focused primarily on corporate document storage, rather than storage of consumer data, and this is likely to change.
Mark Schwanhausser, senior analyst for multichannel financial services at Javelin Strategy and Research in Pleasanton, Calif., said consumers 45 to 64 — the archetypal baby boomers — have the strongest document storage need, but two-thirds said they were either unlikely or very unlikely to use an online vault, according to research conducted by Javelin. By contrast, the strongest demographic for development of vault products were those 25 to 34, where 23% said they would be likely to try it.
"They are online and they are starting to develop the paperwork need," Schwanhausser said.
The biggest hurdle, he said, is a concern that these services are based on software that may not be suited for the long-term storage of paperwork like tax records, mortgage documents or deeds for property, which in some cases need to be held for decades.
Meanwhile, for Hearst and other print businesses that have been hurt by online media, Manilla "is a sign that traditional media companies know they need innovation to get themselves out of the hole they are in," Cohen said. "They are looking afield to experiment with new models for engaging new audiences."
