• Recent Posts

  • Online Retail in Australia Set to Bloom
  • Constraints Are Good
  • Good Ideas are Worthless
  • Manage Time More Efficiently
  • More Australians Shop Online Than Not
  • Keep It Simple
  • Create Systems for Everything
  • TM Auctions Relaunched as Exclusive Auction System
  • Due date filter for to-do lists
  • Studiotime now supports due dates

• Categories

  • Business
  • News
  • Process
  • TM Auctions
  • Web Design
  • Web Development

• RSS

  • RSS
  • Comments RSS

• Archives

  • June 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • November 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • May 2008
  • March 2008
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • April 2007
  • October 2006

When is internet banking going to get with the times?

Published on May 26, 2009 by Steve Thomas in Business

A few years ago I started using Quicken to manage my business and personal accounting.

At the time it was a great tool to manage my tiny cashflow  – I was a poor student, and delivering pizzas  for $8.50 an hour plus tips a few nights a week. I had to be ultra careful with my spending because my non-discretionary expenses must’ve been in the magnitude of 95% of my income. I had a credit card with a limit of about $1,000 and a bank account to my name.

Back then, the thing that peeved me off was the amount of manual labour involved in keeping the various account transactions up to date. Certainly I made it harder for myself by tracking even petty cash, but the banks had virtually no support for automated synchronization. Once I graduated from my course and started earning enough not to worry about financial implosion, I gladly laid my Quicken data to rest.

Fast forward 4 years and i’m starting to think in terms of buying a house, new car, and even live and work abroad.

So I had a look at a nifty web service called Buxfer. I was quickly impressed at the simple, application-like interface, and even more impressed at the promised synchronization with my actual banking data. Within minutes I had an account up and running. Not surprisingly, none of my Australian financial institutions were listed in the supported banks, but then I discovered a Firefox addon that supposedly would retrieve my data in a semi-automated way.

Cool! Or so I thought. But alas, as it turns out, the addon is not capable of logging in and retrieving any of my banking data. And its not really surprising, given the mine field of javascript and security precautions the banking sites have in place, they are specifically designed to block out such a “robot” accessing my data.

I quickly turned my frustration from the Buxfer service to the financial institutions themselves. They know that many of their customers are using internet capable applications and services to track accounts – why not establish a secure international standard (RSS + HTTP Authentication comes to mind) that allows software to access such data?

This is clearly a function that millions of tech-savvy people could utilize – why not let us opt-in to access our own data?

I should point out that it seems that much of the US and Canada have various services supporting this very functionality – so its just our aussie banks dragging the chain then.

Comments