Tip - Centrally manage all your reward accounts using ANZ Bank Money Manager

All Other Q&A
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Hi Folks,

You may have heard about ANZ Bank’s Money Manager - if not, head here and read all about it. Basically, it is a personal finance tool to help you track & manage  your finances. The way it works is that you supply your banks/credit cards username and passwords (hold on to that sinking thought…) and it seems to scrape the site & pull in all the transactions into a single place.

What you may not know though, is that you could also use this tool to also track your loyalty points across multiple programs worldwide So far, I have been able to add my Qantas, Velocity, IHG, Hilton Honors accounts & and it aggregates all my points (including individual transactions such as hotel stays) accrual across all the programs.

Now, I know many of you may feel uncomfortable sharing your login details with a 3rd Party site - it’s ok if you want to tune off now, but if you are intrigued you may want to consider the following (some points are slightly off-topic):

  • The service is free (well, nothing is free; see last point) - you don't need to have an ANZ bank/credit card account.
  • There are various other benefits like Spend Alerts, Expense Analysis etc which have proved quite useful to me - especially during tax time, but I'll let their website do the selling for you. While you are there, you may want to have a glance of what they do to "secure" your information
  • Once an account is registered, all transactions are permanently stored & thus  it provides the benefit of access to historical transactions . A lot of reward programs don't give you access to statements older than 90 days (AMEX Membership Rewards - I'm looking at you), so this may be a useful way to track your points accrual historically
  •  ANZ may very well be mining all your transactions (esp across other financial institutions if you choose to link a bank or credit card account) and could be using for some kind of insight or analysis - this is a privacy trade-off you need to consider if you want to make for sake of some convenience. As I said earlier - nothing is free! Consider this - every one of your credit card & frequent flyer transaction is up for sale to a buyer somewhere :-)

Again, to re-iterate this gives you a some convenience to look at reward accounts in a central place rather than having to log on to each reward site individually to track points. I personally use the site for managing my personal finance, and thus I get better insight for other accounts I manage there - your mileage may vary :slight_smile:
Happy Tracking!
SS

P.S: If you found the tip useful, Please consider using my AMEX Referral Link to sign up for the AMEX Platinum Charge Card and you could receive a welcome bonus of 120,000 Membership Rewards® points when you’re approved! Plus, enjoy premium travel and dining benefits including applying for a free Platinum Edge/Reserve card which could give you a free domestic return flight in Australia.

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Thanks Sid! I’ve removed the screenshot as it wasn’t showing properly. Interesting that ANZ’s service will scrape loyalty accounts like this too.

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I’ve started using AwardWallet and MoneySoft in the last couple of months, although they are separate tools as opposed to the ANZ all-in-one approach. AW is for points/miles and MS is for budgeting. The customer service of both of these sites has been fantastic.\r\nBecause MS is $20/mth I would expect there is less incentive to sell off your transaction information to others. I might double-check with them, though!\r\nYMMV :slight_smile:

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Excellent tip. I will certainly give it a go. I have been using Westpac’s equivalent for many years though (a) you have to be a customer and (b) it’s been having problems with my Qantas accounts recently. In terms of privacy, I’d trust ANZ over the specialist companies. They have the most to lose in terms of reputational risk in both in term of trust (that they won’t misuse your data) and security of the credentials. So they SHOULD be more secure and not be abusing your data.

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Thanks. FYI, the service runs on the Yodlee Money Manager platform (US Based), which has been white labelled to ANZ Bank.

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More broadly on the ANZ Money Manager service - I love the idea of it but providing your log-in and password details to a third party (as you have to in order to use this service) will typically put you in breach of your agreement with financial institutions.\r\n\r\nSo if you were to suffer fraud to your account due to providing your password to ANZ Money Manager, the typical assurances that your bank would provide you around limiting your liability for fraudulent transactions would not apply.\r\n\r\nI asked ANZ about this directly a few years ago when I was seriously considering using the Money Manager service and they very explicitly gave no assurances and told me it was dependent upon my relationship with my bank.\r\n\r\nBecause of that, I never signed up.

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