Some of the country’s trillion-dollar banks have spent the past three years launching digital offshoots that mimic their startup competitors, but the promise of stand-alone personal finance management apps from incumbent banks remains largely unfulfilled. JPMorgan Chase’s Finn shut down last summer and Wells Fargo’s Greenhouse is still in a seven-state pilot after a year and a half, so is modernization on the horizon? 

“The traditional narrative has been, this is a way for big incumbent banks to modernize with the trusted backing of a big bank,” said Stephen Greer, a senior analyst at Celent. “There have been a lot of challenges to that line of thinking.” 

Personal finance management (PFM) apps from major banks can help grow deposits by gaining new customers in different markets, but could also just be cannibalizing existing customers. The apps are often built upon the banks’ existing tech stacks, said Greer, who views stand-alone products as an innovation test or a longer proof-of-concept for big banks. 

Wells Fargo announced Greenhouse, its stand-alone PFM app geared toward those “new to banking,” in November 2017, and launched the pilot a year later. Although Wells Fargo told Bank Innovation in May that it aimed to take Greenhouse nationwide by the end of 2019, the bank confirmed this week that Greenhouse is still in a seven-state pilot stage. 

Greenhouse allows users to divide money into a spend account and a bills account so consumers can budget more easily. The app even prompts consumers on how much they should put away for bills, based on transaction data. “As an industry, we do a fairly good job of saying, ‘This is how you spent your money,’” Peggy Mangot, senior vice president of innovation and head of Greenhouse’s development, told Bank Innovation last year. “That’s very much of a look back. What Greenhouse does that is very different and unique is, it’s proactive.” 

Whether such budgeting features add value, however, is up for debate. “That’s table stakes,” said Alyson Clarke, principal analyst at Forrester Research. She added that the money management tools could be beneficial to Wells Fargo’s broader customer base. “I’m astounded they built this separately and not in the Wells Fargo app itself.” 

Greer said separate PFM apps often struggle to gain consumers’ primary banking relationship. Customers might transfer funds from a separate bank account and use tools like Greenhouse and the now-defunct Finn to help them budget.  

See also: Why Chase decided to drop digital-banking app Finn

Chase shut down its standalone PFM app Finn in June after launching it a year prior. Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said on an earnings call that Finn was not a failure and that “mistakes are what make you smarter and better.” According to Dimon and Chase CFO Jennifer Piepszak, the Finn experiment helped the bank cut down account-opening times.  

Lessons learned or not, Clarke said she is not surprised the project folded. “There was absolutely no value in that product,” she said. The only real differentiator was a feature that allowed customers to rate how happy a purchase made them feel, which Clarke said helped the bank, not the customer.  

Not all stand-alone offshoots are the same. Marcus by Goldman Sachs, for example, was established by a bank that didn’t have a pre-existing retail presence, which differentiates it, according to Greer. Marcus gained $72 billion in deposits as of March 31. Nevertheless, consumer banking accounts for just over 3% of Goldman Sachs’ overall revenue, according to The Motley Fool.  

If banks are simply using digital offshoots as tech sandpits, Clarke said they should acknowledge that, and hire outside thinkers instead of simply shuffling employees around at the bank. 

“Banks might kid themselves that they are going to build the next Monzo, but you can’t run away from yourself if you are doing the same things with the same business models,” Clarke said. “Most of these digital offshoots will not survive the other side of the recession.”