In BillGuard’s very similar case, diligent users (“spotters”) that anyway check every line item of their cc statements (about 10% of Americans) have several incentives for using BillGuard and flagging/editing/commenting transactions:

1. Save Time: Any input you give BillGuard about transactions on your bills makes BillGuard smarter and better at protecting YOU. The system learns the DNA of what you consider to be ok, unsure and bad transactions and helps prioritize the stuff you should look at first. The UX is akin to Google Priority Mail. With a few clicks you’re going to see your transaction list in a whole new way and be far more efficient at checking your statements.
2. New Clarity: BillGuard decodes cryptic transaction descriptions (that only a bank computer could love) into human-speak and adds rich metadata and media to help you easily make sense of every transaction. Some really cool work here that I can’t announce yet.
3. Tell The World: Turns out when you’re pissed about being taking advantage of by a merchant/scammer, you want to tell the world. You don’t have a voice today to do so on scale. BillGuard is your amplified voice to tell every other customer that’s been hit.
4. Get Credit: We will be recognizing and rewarding top spotters and their contribution (knowledge and savings) to the community. More on that when we launch our beta.

That said, verifying transactions in BillGuard is completely optional and the service does not rely on just crowdsourced data. There’s a ton of data and complaints online about charges that currently appear on your bills and BillGuard is structuring all that data into one massive, actionable database. We’ve also got patent-pending data mining algorithms being diligent for you; auto-magically spotting bad transactions without you doing a thing.

Someday your bank will have “BillGuard Inside” to alleviate any hesitation you might have with a startup, but until then we want you as a user Dave. We’re facilitating this consumer advocacy movement but BillGuard is being built collaboratively with our users. We need more of your feedback. Please email me directly at yaron@billguard.com if you’re interested.

Yaron

If they already do, they probably don’t need to share their sensitive financial data with you and are unlikely to require the services – Vlad’s point I guess. If your users don’t typically review personal financial data, then how do you ensure enough flagging activities to make the system effective?

I gather the crowdsourcing ingenuity is in a very small number of diligent users doing the work for all the rest? But again, if I were one of those diligent users, it would take some seriously compelling evidence that your system would add valuable security to make it worthwhile to share financial data. Seems like a bit of a bind to me.

As a service built into internal credit card security monitoring, ok. But “hand over [my] financial data” for a poor value proposition? Some people, other people – lots of them I hope for you – but not me.

To clarify, you do not crowdsource your personal financial information. No one sees your card activity but you. Similarly to how your email service scans your inbox for incoming spam identified (flagged) by others in *their own* inboxes, BillGuard scans your bills and alerts you when a charge on your bill has been flagged by others on *their own* bills. You’re still responsible for your bills, we just help bring the questionable stuff to your attention. Does that make sense.

Yaron
CEO, BillGuard

Maybe next will be a webcam-based “ChildGuard” in my kids play room so I can go get groceries and crowdsource the responsibility of ensuring their safety?

Thanks. This service has no value