PFM (Personal Financial Management) refers to credit union software that helps users manage their money through visual charts and graphs. While this seems like great technology on the surface, it mostly applies to people who are flush with assets and money to manage. This clearly does not apply to a great wealth of people, no pun intended. While it may be appealing to a subset of your members, here are 7 reasons your members don’t really care about these tools, and why your investment and time into pushing PFM’s should be limited:

1. Pie Charts are pretty, but…. unless your mind is geared towards better understanding the graphical representation of your bank accounts, how necessary is it? Will you look at a pie chart before making any large purchase decisions? Probably not.

2. Time is money… and keeping your PFM software current and licensed can be time-consuming. While some of these tools automatically sync with account data, there can be hiccups with the application programming interface (API). You might end up spending a lot of time trying to establish or re-establish connections to your accounts and working with 3rd parties to resolve issues.

continue reading »