(MONEY Magazine) – Until recently, financial services companies had shown no interest in marketing online services to the very wealthy. How could a mere Web page, after all, compete for their clients' loyalty against a coterie of Armani-suited private bankers? These days, however, firms old and new have belatedly realized that the rich are as intrigued by the Net as everyone else--and they're scrambling to launch services for millionaires that combine "best in class" personal attention with "innovative Internet technology," as the website of one money-management start-up happily proclaims.

Color me unimpressed. While most of the promised wealth-management sites have yet to be launched, those that have look decidedly less innovative--and far less useful--than their marketers would have you believe. Stalwarts like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter are working on such sites but so far have nothing to show for their efforts. In the meantime, point-and-click millionaires who want to bank with a trusted name will have to content themselves with J.P. Morgan's Morgan OnLine. Essentially, Morgan OnLine offers people with a net worth of $1 million or more a jazzed-up version of the tools available to hoi polloi on such sites as Quicken.com or MSN MoneyCentral--portfolio trackers, bill payment and so on. You've got to input your information by hand, just like everyone else--and pay $2,500 for the privilege. Sound a bit like Tom Sawyer's famous fence-painting ploy to you too?

Not so, says Morgan OnLine CEO Glenn Smith, who assures me that it's worth every (pretty) penny. Morgan's software allows investors to keep track of an enormous variety of assets (from stocks to yachts) and to slice and dice the data in a staggering number of ways. If your asset allocation is out of whack, the site's analytical engines will pinpoint the problem investments in your portfolio and give you advice about what to buy and sell. "Think of it as an MRI scan of your portfolio," he says.

Another company that professes to combine high-tech with high touch is myCFO, a start-up founded by start-up legend Jim Clark, the man behind Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon. You simply hand your financial shoebox, as it were, over to the busy beavers at myCFO. They will develop charts and reports analyzing your investments--even if your assets are spread across a number of different institutions--and tell you just how much you'll have to hand over to the tax man. In between quarterly reports and consultations, clients can use myCFO's tools to track and review their holdings. "Our clients have a great appreciation for technology," says Jennifer Bailey, a myCFO senior v.p. "They want to be at a firm they feel will really push the leading edge."

Despite such claims, and the firm's high-tech pedigree, what really powers myCFO, to borrow a phrase from Charlton Heston in Soylent Green, "is...people!" While the site's technology remains surprisingly underdeveloped, it has quickly hired the human talent necessary to make sense of the finances of Internet millionaires and old-money clients to boot. All this human power isn't cheap. The minimum annual charge for myCFO's services is $25,000, and most clients pay far more than that. At least a few millionaires have decided it's worth it: The company says it has signed up some 275 clients so far, with an average net worth of $150 million each.

Though myCFO has gotten the lion's share of media attention, Morgan OnLine may be the real harbinger of what's to come. Ironically, it is the nonmillionaires who will ultimately reap most of the benefits of this top-down financial revolution. Smith assures me that Morgan has no plans to sully its hands with the assets of nonmillionaires. But anyone who knows anything about the history of Internet technology can see that the sorts of services now being hawked to the rich at Morgan OnLine will inevitably fall into the hands of everyone. Once you write the code for applications like these, there's no good reason to reserve it for an elite few, and if Morgan OnLine doesn't bring sophisticated wealth-management tools to the masses, someone else will.

But what's good news for most of us isn't necessarily good news for garden-variety millionaires, many of whom will find themselves pushed away from old-fashioned (and expensive) human advisers and into the land of automated portfolio analysis. So much for exclusivity. Being rich has its privileges. Access to overpriced technology isn't one of them.