Laura Rowley Money & Happiness

Personal finance is getting faster and, well, more personal, judging from the new technologies unveiled at the Finovate conference in New York City on Oct. 2.

The event showcased clever solutions for a variety of personal finance dilemmas, but the biggest trends were products to track your money in real time and build a social network to support your financial goals. Here are the highlights.

Motivation for Young Debtors

Geezeo, a free online account aggregation tool and social networking site, is aimed at 18- to- 34-year olds who want financial control -- with a little help from their friends. "Instead of writing five checks a week, this group is doing thirty-five debit transactions in a week," says cofounder Peter Glyman. "They have become more and more detached from their finances."

Users aggregate all of their accounts -- savings, checking, credit cards, student and auto loans, and so on -- in one place. Transactions appear on Geezeo in real time, and can be easily sorted into spending categories. And users can check their bank balances by text message to avoid overdraft charges.

The big twist here is a social networking component that invites users to chat about financial products and start their own discussion groups around common interests (like "starving musicians") and mutual goals (such as "pay off my credit cards"). Other users can offer encouraging comments, or even chip in toward the cause via PayPal. So far the groups are sparsely populated, but there's potential here -- if only because it's much more inviting to chat about money anonymously than to disclose precarious financial matters to family and friends.

Help for the Financially Clueless

Mint is a free money management tool that's a cocktail of Quicken, Google, and LowerMyBills.com. It takes a few minutes to set up -- users register anonymously, and then add login information for bank accounts, credit cards, and other accounts they want to aggregate. Mint claims its patent-pending technology can automatically track and classify your spending in specific categories with 95 percent accuracy, versus about 45 percent for Quicken. It will email you when you have a low account balance or a bill due.

Mint's unique proposition: Click the "Ways to Save" tab and it'll suggest savings that are unique and personal to you. The company claims its users typically find $1,000 in savings opportunities in their first session. In his demo at the conference, founder Aaron Patzer showed an example of someone who had $22,000 in a Fifth Third Bank account earning no interest. By switching to an ING Electric Orange account at 3.5 percent interest, the consumer would have $700 to $800 a year more in his pocket.

Well, duh. I seriously doubt there are any Yahoo! Finance readers keeping $22,000 in a zero-interest checking account (at least I hope there aren't). If you already get the whole magic-of-compounding thing, you might be more interested in a Mint application that tracks how you spend money on your credit card and suggests one that would offer more rewards based on your spending patterns. And if Mint notices that you're spending $150 on separate cable, phone, and Internet services, it'll suggest that you bundle the services and tell you how much you'd save.

Although Patzer says Mint doesn't keep track of names, Social Security numbers, and the like, you have to wonder how many people will be comfortable sharing all of that financial data with a web site -- which then shares it with vendors. Patzer says the company will be objective, suggesting the best leading vendor for users regardless of whether the vendor pays Mint referral fees. He also says users will view these savings suggestions as value-added opportunities rather than intrusive advertising. Time will tell.

Cash for the Strapped

When Renaud Laplanche was building his first company, TripleHop Technologies, he financed it with personal loans and annoyingly high-interest credit cards. He eventually sold the business to Oracle. That experience inspired his new company, Lending Club.

Lending Club, which launched on Facebook in May and had its own site by September, uses technology to match borrowers to lenders willing to offer unsecured loans of $500 to $25,000 with three-year, fully amortizing terms. The distinctive angle here: The search technology looks for social connections between the borrower and the lender.

A potential lender goes to the site, inputs the amount he's willing to lend and the level of risk he's willing to take, and then the site looks through the existing pool of borrowers for affiliations -- a shared college alma mater, professional experience, or geographic background. The lender sees a description of the loan, but no personal information on the borrower. On its first 100 days on Facebook, the company facilitated $1 million in loans at an average interest rate of 12.6 percent.

But this isn't a solution for the subprime crowed. Potential borrowers are weighed on the same criteria a bank would use: a FICO score of at least 640 and a debt-to-income ratio of 25 percent or less, excluding mortgages. Late payments are reported to credit bureaus.

In the auction space, Prosper is the largest person-to-person lender with 430,000 members lending $91 million in the first year. The borrower profiles are extensive, including the repayment history of other Prosper loans and endorsements from friends who have bid on the loan.

Prosper mined its own data to give lenders a better view of their risk. A new feature tells borrowers the historical risk of default on a specific kind of loan, such as loans to recent college grads. In addition, a new tool allows lenders to construct a portfolio of Prosper loans with a predictable rate of return and a specific risk level. Users can create and publish their own portfolio plans, which other lenders can grab and personalize. "We're expanding the power of community and collective wisdom to get great lending decisions," says Chris Larsen, Prosper CEO and cofounder.

An Option for Late Payers

A business-to-business technology that looks particularly promising for the busy or careless bill payer is the expedited payment option. It was created by Metavante, a technology payment provider that serves 90 of the largest 100 U.S. financial institutions.

Imagine you're on a business trip and realize you haven't paid the mortgage. You hop online and the bank offers you the option to pay immediately for $4.95. Sure, the bank earns a little income for what's normally a free service -- but you get to pay the mortgage instantly without a ding on your credit report or a late fee (which would no doubt be higher than $4.95).

It's a win-win solution for an obvious service gap in the online pay world. Watch for it at a bank near you.