But wait, there's more. Their sister site is called moneyStrands.com, and where they want you to sign up and give them all your financial information. They want to do your finances, so you don't have to. They even have a spokesperson, Monica, and she has a profile. You can read her profile and see how moneyStrands has worked for her. Interestingly, it's all a lie, because Monica is a cartoon. https://money.strands.com/content/monicas-profile
A spokesperson is a real person. Catherine Zeta Jones is being paid for being a spokesperson for T-Mobil. So, the whack thing about Strands is that they've set up this entire story about this spokesperson, Monica, with an actual profile describing how she graduated from a college in Oregon and moved to San Francisco, and likes sushi and yoga, etc.
I don't have anything against cartoons as mascots, etc, but when a social network that is trying to convince you that it's OK to sign in and give them all your information by giving you information about their real-live spokesperson employee, your trust in this company is going to be based on the authenticity of this person.
And, I don't know - maybe this Monica is a real person. But if so, why not show her face? You know, if Jared from Subway was a cartoon, that would be OK, except that his whole thing about losing 100 pounds on the Subway diet would then be meaningless. It's just weird that you go to the Strands site, and there's photos and a video tutorial with real people, and then if you click the tiny link to money.strands, you get Monica. When you check out what money.strands is all about, you realize that no real person would simply give away all their financial and personal data, hence the cartoon. A spokesperson is supposed to instill confidence is their company, but Monica just makes me suspicious.
5 comments:
Hi Brian- My name is Lucia, I'm the Community Manager at moneyStrands. Thanks for checking out our website. I wanted to clarify a couple points about moneyStrands that may have been confusing from first glance at our application. The first is that we don't control finances for people. moneyStrands is a read-only application that helps people see where their money is going so they can take control of their finances. Our tool helps people create budgets and analyze their spending so they can identify ways to save.
The second point of clarification is regarding financial information. We give users the option of automatically linking their accounts (by providing their bank's login credentials) OR they can manually import data through a CSV, OFX or QIF file. In addition, users register on our site anonymously with only an email address, not their full name. Users can expect the same level of security they receive from their bank. We have many security practices in place to ensure that everyones data is safe.
Thanks again for checking out our site. I hope this information helps clarify what we do and how we help others.
Lucia @ moneyStrands
Thank you for the clarification of your services, Lucia. However, the question still remains whether Monica, the cartoon, is a real person, as her profile portends her to be an actual employee.
I'm sure your services are trustworthy enough, I'm just questioning the angle at which you aim to attract customers. Bringing them in through the primary Strands site, with great spokespeople such as Nicole Teeter and Caitlin Burns, and then meeting them with a cartoon seems a bit of a let-down.
Brian- Monica is a persona we developed based on our main user group. While she is not a real person, her story is based on real life situations and she is someone that our users relate to.
Great. That always happens. I start dating someone, and she ends up not being a real person.
Hi Lucia,
I love both sites, however, one of the security measures you talked about is bypassed when a person signs up for both of your services (strands and moneystrands) as strands does require the person to enter their full name, city and full date of birth, with the information from both sites consolidated you will have a person's DOB, full name and log in info to their bank account. I know that both sites merge the log in info because after signing up for monayestrands I went to sign up for strands and it recognized my e-mail as being already in use, I then proceeded to log in to strands using the moneystrands info and it worked, no need to re-register, however makes me a little uncomfortable, as one of the things you pointed out will prevent fraud doesn't apply to users of both sites.
Post a Comment