Banking Heavyweights Invest in Meca

With the online banking industry off and running, three more financial institutions have hitched their wagons to the personal finance program they hope will give them a leg up on the competition.

First Bank System, Fleet Financial Group, and Royal Bank of Canada have announced their investments in Meca Software, the company that produces Managing Your Money. The move links the three institutions in a financial consortium with Meca co-owners BankAmerica Corporation and NationsBank.

The deal throws considerable weight behind Managing Your Money, Meca's PC personal finance software, which ranks third behind Intuit's Quicken and Microsoft Money.

A bid by Microsoft (which was later abandoned) to acquire Intuit earlier this year jump-started the rush to provide home banking online. In its wake, BankAmerica and NationsBank acquired Meca; Microsoft, Intuit, and Visa International began actively recruiting banks to market their software programs.

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