Online Banking is a strange beast. Because it’s tied into something as permanent as my bank account, it’s unlike any other software on the web: Free from the carefree attitude held by customers of webmail, search engines and blogging CMS that allows them to migrate to a different service every few years when something shinier comes along, online banking keeps customers for many years regardless of technology moving around it.
Frankly, the stagnation is pissing me off.
To clarify, I bank with Smile. I took out the account when I started uni and I can’t consider moving until after I graduate as I’m now dependent on the overdraft. The thing is, Smile is an internet only bank. So you’d be forgiven for expecting something quite cutting edge from their software. Something special. It’s not. It’s functional and little more.
A knock-on effect of online banking being tied into bank accounts is that I’ve no recent experience with any other provider. I’ve see over the shoulder of Jo using Nationwide’s service, and it looks superior to Smile, but it’s not a revolution away. At a time when public internet services are sucking up Ajax and open data from party pitchers, I want to know whether online banking is going to make a similar, user-centric leap forward.
Think of this post as a wishlist for online banking. One which I’ll email to my bank next week and which I’d rather like to hear your thoughts on. Does some other bank already offer it?
Deep breath.
Downloadable XML statements.
The core of it all. Open data. Smile’s UI for browsing statements is especially poor, it has to be said, but if I could only download the data into a spreadsheet package I could have so much more control than a web UI could realistically offer anyway.
Filtering, grouping, custom date ranges. All very useful. How about being able to link rows of the statement with clients in a separate database (or even just with the address book)? Develop an open standard for distributing financial data (if there isn’t already) and the door is open for any number of third party applications to help manage my money. The door is open for some really good applications.
Feeds of statements.
OK, this is also familiar ground. I get all kinds of information from all over the world fed to me through RSS or Atom. But if I want to know if a client has paid me, or if my phone bill has left my account, why do I still need to log into a website to find it?
I wouldn’t necessarily want to see my account movements mixed in with the latest news headlines, but it’s another form of information distribution that could very neatly tie in with a number of existing desktop tools. Take an existing Dashboard feed reader widget and pow, instant desktop account statement. Oh, sorry, was that too easy?
iCalendar
This is what inspired the post, actually. In iCal, I have a calendar to track my bill payments and direct debits. Some of the entries are only approximate dates; payments can and do vary a bit (avoiding weekends and so forth). Periodically, I might need to manually intervene to tweak my estimate of when a payment is leaving the account.
However, all these dates are available from my bank. Why can’t I subscribe to an iCalendar containing all my upcoming payments for the next two months? If the next payment date is unknown, then the server can dynamically adjust my calendar entries to the date of the most recent payment whenever they’re made, giving me more accurate information.
Except, of course
I can predict a couple of immediate responses to the idea of making online banking more open. Security is a big one. Online Banking remains an extremely paranoid area of the web as regards security. Back buttons are disabled, JavaScript is demanded and the log-in routine is often cryptic at best. People will claim that a consumer friendly RSS feed won’t be secure enough but there are two key points. Firstly, this is read-only data. We’re not giving any authorisation to pay any money to anyone. By all means, keep that kind of functionality locked away if you need to.
But reading data isn’t as critical as having all my money stolen. Sure, it’s sensitive and it should certainly be an opt-in choice as to whether the data is available at all ,but the risk is still small. As such, it’s a risk that I personally would be prepared to take. Furthermore, provide some sort of Flickr-esque authentication of each application that wants to access the data and lock-out the nasties.
Online banking still seems to be considered as a bit of an add-on and a gimmick by the banks providing it. That is, of course, the most stupid viewpoint they could hold. I really hope that I’m wrong and the real situation isn’t so clear cut and negative. I honestly hope that this year we see a bank stand up and say “here’s an online service that’s actually integral to the way you work”.
So who do you bank with? Do they come anywhere close? What would you like to see from a 21st century online bank?
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.