11/12/20 An Update from Eric Dunn, Quicken CEO
Quicken Sarah
Alumni ✭✭✭✭
Hello,
I am writing with the fall update on the state of Quicken. In this time of the global pandemic, the Quicken team has been working remotely at all our locations, but we have continued to make excellent progress on our products, which I will describe below. However, before doing so, I wanted to mention a few of the ways that we have been supporting our communities in this challenging year.
At all of our locations, we have redeployed office expense money to provide monthly funding to local food banks. We have set up a program allowing employees to obtain matching company funds for donations to nonprofits of their choice. And we have continued our policy of allowing Quicken employees to perform volunteer work to support their communities up to four days per year. As a company, we want to show our support for the communities that are home to our team members and have sought out ways to do so with heightened urgency during the pandemic.
Back to Quicken and Simplifi. In its first year on the market, Simplifi by Quicken got off to a great start, being named the "Best Budgeting App" by the New York Times’ Wirecutter, as well as a Fast Company Design Honorable Mention. Even more importantly, customer satisfaction for Simplifi has already matched Quicken’s and continues to rise as we roll out additional capabilities such as Smart Alerts, budgeted spending for the Spending Plan, and more flexible reports. Overall, Simplifi is doing what we hoped – bringing comprehensive personal finance capabilities to a 21st-century generation of mobile/cloud-oriented users in an elegant, modern app.
But Quicken has not been standing still. Since the beginning of the year, we have introduced an entirely new bill payment system, Quicken Bill Manager, in both our Windows and Mac products: Bill Manager offers speedy 24-hour (or faster) payments with QuickPay and the ability to pay anyone with a U.S. mailing address by using CheckPay (Bill Manager is available on Premier and above for free, and on Deluxe for a fee). In addition, Windows Quicken now offers a much-improved method for adding accounts and setting up connections to financial institutions, a "Quicken Setup" feature for getting started, a streamlined all-in-one Investment Dashboard, and an optional new approach to tracking investments at a less granular level, Simple Investing. On the Mac platform, we have entirely revamped access to Reports, extended Asset and Liability Reports, added Budgets for transfers, refined and improved Renaming Rules, and will soon release significant enhancements to Reconcile.
We have also continued to make progress on fixing bugs and reducing crashes in Quicken. Many of you, in your emails and letters to me, have noted the progress we have made in these areas – we are glad you see and appreciate the difference! On a quantitative basis, we have seen the reported exception rate (exceptions often lead to crashes) decline steadily for both Mac Quicken and Windows Quicken over the past year.
The Quicken web and mobile companion apps have continued to improve. The impact of these improvements is evident both in strong customer satisfaction ratings and in the App Store, where the Quicken mobile companion is now rated 4.6 stars out of a possible 5 by its iOS users.
Connectivity – the ability for our Quicken and Simplifi users to easily and reliably download transactions and bills – has been a major area of focus over the last year and will continue to be in the year ahead. On Quicken for Windows, we have been implementing a technology upgrade for EWC account downloads that creates additional flexibility for us to improve connectivity in the future (Quicken Mac and Simplifi already have this capability); leveraging this, we have significant connectivity enhancements lined up over the next 12-24 months. Our goal of further widening our lead in providing the best-quality financial connectivity of any personal finance product is now within reach.
Even with great software, tracking your finances can be complicated. That’s why we’ve always backed Quicken (and now Simplifi) with great Customer Care, where assistance is only a phone call or a chat session away. We have been focusing on training and agent tenure to help us provide fast, accurate answers and have seen good results from this emphasis. We also continue to invest in Care technology: this year we deployed an improved screen-share system with an annotation capability, and we began providing access to in-product help (Windows only so far) from quicken.com/support as part of search results.
Overall, we believe that Quicken and now Simplifi continue to set the bar for the best personal finance tools on the market. We are proud of what we’ve already done and are committed to continuing our work to improve your experience with our products and services.
But there’s no question that 2020 has been a tough year for everyone. At Quicken, we are thankful that we have been able to carry out our work to create, deploy, and support great financial software. And we look forward, with hope, to better times in 2021 and to continuing to help people live healthy financial lives in a healthier world.
From all of us, thank you for being a Quicken customer.
CEO, Quicken Inc.
... and the Quicken Team.
I am writing with the fall update on the state of Quicken. In this time of the global pandemic, the Quicken team has been working remotely at all our locations, but we have continued to make excellent progress on our products, which I will describe below. However, before doing so, I wanted to mention a few of the ways that we have been supporting our communities in this challenging year.
At all of our locations, we have redeployed office expense money to provide monthly funding to local food banks. We have set up a program allowing employees to obtain matching company funds for donations to nonprofits of their choice. And we have continued our policy of allowing Quicken employees to perform volunteer work to support their communities up to four days per year. As a company, we want to show our support for the communities that are home to our team members and have sought out ways to do so with heightened urgency during the pandemic.
Back to Quicken and Simplifi. In its first year on the market, Simplifi by Quicken got off to a great start, being named the "Best Budgeting App" by the New York Times’ Wirecutter, as well as a Fast Company Design Honorable Mention. Even more importantly, customer satisfaction for Simplifi has already matched Quicken’s and continues to rise as we roll out additional capabilities such as Smart Alerts, budgeted spending for the Spending Plan, and more flexible reports. Overall, Simplifi is doing what we hoped – bringing comprehensive personal finance capabilities to a 21st-century generation of mobile/cloud-oriented users in an elegant, modern app.
But Quicken has not been standing still. Since the beginning of the year, we have introduced an entirely new bill payment system, Quicken Bill Manager, in both our Windows and Mac products: Bill Manager offers speedy 24-hour (or faster) payments with QuickPay and the ability to pay anyone with a U.S. mailing address by using CheckPay (Bill Manager is available on Premier and above for free, and on Deluxe for a fee). In addition, Windows Quicken now offers a much-improved method for adding accounts and setting up connections to financial institutions, a "Quicken Setup" feature for getting started, a streamlined all-in-one Investment Dashboard, and an optional new approach to tracking investments at a less granular level, Simple Investing. On the Mac platform, we have entirely revamped access to Reports, extended Asset and Liability Reports, added Budgets for transfers, refined and improved Renaming Rules, and will soon release significant enhancements to Reconcile.
We have also continued to make progress on fixing bugs and reducing crashes in Quicken. Many of you, in your emails and letters to me, have noted the progress we have made in these areas – we are glad you see and appreciate the difference! On a quantitative basis, we have seen the reported exception rate (exceptions often lead to crashes) decline steadily for both Mac Quicken and Windows Quicken over the past year.
The Quicken web and mobile companion apps have continued to improve. The impact of these improvements is evident both in strong customer satisfaction ratings and in the App Store, where the Quicken mobile companion is now rated 4.6 stars out of a possible 5 by its iOS users.
Connectivity – the ability for our Quicken and Simplifi users to easily and reliably download transactions and bills – has been a major area of focus over the last year and will continue to be in the year ahead. On Quicken for Windows, we have been implementing a technology upgrade for EWC account downloads that creates additional flexibility for us to improve connectivity in the future (Quicken Mac and Simplifi already have this capability); leveraging this, we have significant connectivity enhancements lined up over the next 12-24 months. Our goal of further widening our lead in providing the best-quality financial connectivity of any personal finance product is now within reach.
Even with great software, tracking your finances can be complicated. That’s why we’ve always backed Quicken (and now Simplifi) with great Customer Care, where assistance is only a phone call or a chat session away. We have been focusing on training and agent tenure to help us provide fast, accurate answers and have seen good results from this emphasis. We also continue to invest in Care technology: this year we deployed an improved screen-share system with an annotation capability, and we began providing access to in-product help (Windows only so far) from quicken.com/support as part of search results.
Overall, we believe that Quicken and now Simplifi continue to set the bar for the best personal finance tools on the market. We are proud of what we’ve already done and are committed to continuing our work to improve your experience with our products and services.
But there’s no question that 2020 has been a tough year for everyone. At Quicken, we are thankful that we have been able to carry out our work to create, deploy, and support great financial software. And we look forward, with hope, to better times in 2021 and to continuing to help people live healthy financial lives in a healthier world.
From all of us, thank you for being a Quicken customer.
CEO, Quicken Inc.
... and the Quicken Team.
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