Nov 20 2007

Banking 2.0

Published by at under internet

Banks need to catch up with the improved web interfaces that have become prevalent over the last several years. Where is the search box on your account? I should be able to type in an exact dollar amount and pull up all the recent transactions that match. Or a cheque number, for example. How is it I am still scrolling through the ledger to see if a cheque cleared in the year 2007?

Periodically I’ll dabble in Quicken or other financial tracking software, usually to give up as I just don’t have the time to keep it reconciled properly. Why doesn’t a bank offer category tracking or tagging of payees right on it’s site? No data transfer and potential security problem required. In fact, they should have enough aggregate data to make some pretty accurate guesses about how to tag debits automatically. Gas, or restaurants for instance. I know Yodlee has software along these lines, but I don’t know who’s adopting it.

You should be able to pull up pie charts from these tags, or line graphs of inflows or outflows. You should be able to flag a cheque number and get an SMS when it clears, or when your balance drops too low. Hopefully some of this functionality will be appearing in the near future.

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