Money Manager Expanding Australian-Centric Rules

After the Loaded column looked at ANZ’s Money Manager application recently, I was curious as to what process was being used to develop the categorisation rules used to sort transactions (it generally does a good job, but there’s the occasional missed opportunity as the screenshot shows). As one commenter suggested, Money Manager is using Yodlee’s aggregation technology for its site, and this is how the process works, according to an ANZ spokesperson:

We sent Yodlee a list of major retailers and their categories to manually load into the database. As more users sign up and add their accounts, the database becomes more accurate for the Australian market. For example, if multiple customers change a transaction at Coles Express from ‘Groceries’ to ‘Fuel’, the database is updated to make fuel the default category for Coles Express transactions. If an individual user re-categorises Coles Express as ‘Petrol’ in multiple instances, the database will start to automatically categorise Coles Express as ‘Petrol’ for that customer, and ‘Fuel’ for all other customers.