Innovation in Personal Finance Technology

Born At Citi, Bundle Delivers a Fresh Approach

Americans know they are not saving enough for retirement. They know sometimes they buy things they cannot afford. They realize that as salaries go up, so does personal spending. And they know they are not alone. But these aren’t easy problems to fix. The popular personal finance magazines are all written for people already heading into retirement. The banks and investment companies all have products to sell.

A year ago, a small group of entrepreneurial-minded employees at Citi decided to do something about it. The group, led by Jaidev Shergill, an executive vice president in Citi’s Growth Ventures and Innovation unit, went to their bosses and convinced them to invest in a solution.

The concept they conceived is Bundle, a new personal finance media company designed to help people take control of their finances. Shergill soon interested Citi and Microsoft in becoming partners.

“Clearly, we are living through one of the worst economic climates in recent history,” says Shergill. “People need better ways to save and manage their personal finances. We want to provide real value to real people every day with a smart, human-centric experience that transforms the way each person manages money.”

“After thoroughly thinking through the idea and its implementation, the team realized we needed help from the best banking and technology partners to embark on this venture and create a new series of products that will deliver unique value to the marketplace,” Shergill says.

The Bundle technical team is hard at work building robust, interactive, secure applications with rich-user experiences, but when considering users’ concerns about privacy and security, those issues took priority. Shergill sought advice from both banking security experts and from Microsoft.

With scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency in mind, Bundle has turned to the Windows Azure platform for cloud computing services to supplement the core secure infrastructure. Bundle also plans to incorporate some of Microsoft’s other cutting edge technology components, such as Velocity high-performance caching.

“Microsoft software development and collaboration tools, including Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, and SharePoint, have been instrumental in enhancing the level of collaboration, streamlining design and development processes, and allowing the team to move quickly,” says Shergill. “With the help of the Microsoft Azure platform, we are working to take what has been a difficult to understand and hard to manage undertaking for many Americans and evolve it into an easy, accessible, user-friendly experience.”

As development continues, the Bundle team is confident that by using the best-in-class tools and software from Microsoft, it will be able to create a powerful personal finance platform that enables regular people to simplify their increasingly complicated financial lives.