MoneyAisle.com, a reverse-auction site where lenders compete to offer potential banking customers the highest rates for certificates of deposit and high-yield savings accounts, is getting a big boost from the financial industry itself. NeoSaej, the Burlington, MA-based company behind MoneyAisle (profiled here last month), said today that it has raised over $7 million in new funding, bringing its total financing to more than $10.5 million. The new round was led by an entity that neoSaej, in a news release, identified only as “a large Boston-based money management firm,” but Xconomy has learned from a source outside the company that it is Wellington Management, which oversees more than $550 billion in institutional assets.
Stata Venture Partners II and NeoNet also participated in the funding round. Mukesh Chatter, neoSaej president and CEO, said that the company plans to put the money toward expanding the MoneyAisle platform and beefing up marketing efforts. “We will use the funds primarily to develop additional applications in lending, enhance existing deposit applications, build up promotions and advertising, and recruit new team members,” Chatter tells Xconomy.
MoneyAisle has grown quickly since its June 9 launch. Customers put more than $1 million into CDs and savings accounts set up through the site in its first week alone. At least 72 banks have joined the MoneyAisle network. (Each member bank receives software that allows them to participate in neoSaej’s automated, real-time, Internet-based reverse auctions and to specify, among other things, how aggressively they’d like to bid against competing banks.)
Almost a quarter of the participating banks are in Michigan, where the company has established a strategic alliance with the Michigan Bankers Association. The association has agreed to promote MoneyAisle’s services to its member banks.
“The interest in the MoneyAisle site on the part of both consumers and the banking industry has been very gratifying,” Chatter said in neoSaej’s news release. “After being live for just one month, our consumers are receiving better rates than well-known banking aggregator sites for some of the most popular financial products on the market.”
