US consumers are very interested in personal financial management (PFM) tools, which enable them to track and analyze their spending and create budgets. However, while interest in PFM is high, actual usage remains quite low, indicating potential for growth, a recent survey has revealed.

According to the research, carried out by financial services technology provider Fiserv, the subset of consumers who do employ PFM typically access those tools through their financial institution’s online banking portal, where they can conduct secure transactions within the same site.

Overall, the survey findings highlight the strong opportunity for financial institutions to provide categorization and budgeting tools to consumers within the online banking service itself, as the consumer benefits outweigh those at third-party sites. In addition to enabling the functionalities consumers ranked as beneficial, including the abilities to budget, categorize and chart spending and categorize transactions, many financial institution PFM tools provide the ability to schedule or make payments and analyze future spending.

Nearly 40 percent of polled consumers have indicated that PFM tools would be beneficial to managing their finances, however only 15 percent of them had actually used a PFM service in the past 90 days.

Of the subset of respondents who had used a PFM service in the past 90 days, an overwhelming majority said they did so from online banking sites (68 percent), more than double the percentage that reported using the top named traditional personal financial management software.

In addition, despite the hype surrounding certain third-party online personal financial management sites, use of PFM services at online banking sites was found to be more than twice as high as the top ranked third-party personal financial management website. According to Fiserv, this indicates consumers' preference for, and trust in, online banking sites from their financial institution, which provide secure access to detailed financial information and the ability to complete financial transactions in one integrated user experience.

Overall, only 5 percent of the consumers surveyed had used a PFM service to track multiple accounts through a process known as account aggregation. According to the study, lower adoption of these aggregation-based services may be due to security concerns, with consumers reporting they were wary with regard to the reliability and security of the aggregation process.

Of the PFM service users who said they used account aggregation to track accounts from multiple financial institutions, 48 percent said they have had trouble accessing some of their account information. While there is interest in tracking multiple accounts in one location, the survey found that 44 percent of these same PFM service users would not have been comfortable if they had known that their IDs and passwords were stored by a third party. This percentage nearly doubled among non-users, with 87 percent expressing at least some concern about the storage of their information.