In Programming links, World

Will someone please re-invent banking?

Posted by: on Sep 4, 2008 | 3 Comments

Is it me or is banking so slow to change that we’ll be struggling to keep our heads above the rising sea levels before they actually provide innovative services?

Online banking is all well and good – but do any of your banks provide any services online that they didn’t provide in the past? i.e. is the technology actually providing any innovation, other than cost savings for banks?

Here are some of the rather simple things I would like to be able to do, to allow me to manage my affairs better:

  • Set up alerts on accounts such that if the balance goes below a certain level, I receive and SMS and/or email.
  • Create savings accounts which allow regular automatic payments to come out of them, or be transferred into your current account. E.g. put a lump sum in savings and make monthly payments from it to pay off some bill, while accruing interest on the lump sum.
  • Set up alerts for incoming amounts, i.e. "Alert me by email/SMS when a payment for £2000 is, or if it is not received by 5th September"
  • Set up rules that kick in when alerts are triggered i.e. "Always transfer £500 into current account from savings account when balance of current account is below £300"
  • Have a mobile application that lets you view the balances of all your accounts across your different banks, showing your "net worth" and allowing for automation of transfers between them. An API I hear you say?! Surely not!

You could even have a smart "agent" that contacts you by email/sms or phone, when certain triggers are met (eg low balance) and it could offer some sensible options like transfer some funds from your savings account, arrange a loan etc.

It’s not too much to ask is it – all the infrastructure is there, and the features are simple to implement. Security shouldn’t be a problem for alerts – it all depends what you say in the message (it could be user supplied). You’d think that someone forward-thinking, in theory at least, such as Virgin would jump at stuff like this to grab customers from other banks.

It’s quite amazing that we have these kinds of features in so many applications we use every day and yet something so crucial to our day to day living in the real world does not offer them.

Perhaps they (the banks) need to start to see banking as an Application, seeing as they host it on the web now…

3 Comments

  1. Eric Anderson
    September 4, 2008

    For the automatic payments from a savings account, I have done exactly that. Some banks do, in fact, support this feature. I have done this with both push and pull payments. In other words, I have had the payee pulling payments from the bank, and I have had the bank sending payments to the payee.

    I agree with all of the alerts and triggers. It seems like at least some of this should be relatively low cost to implement. I realize that banking software must have some

    Reply
  2. Eric Anderson
    September 4, 2008

    Oops…

    …must have some legacy issues. But, even with that, they should be able to add some of these features.

    Reply
  3. Marc Palmer
    September 4, 2008

    Eric – which banks? I’ve never seen a savings account in the UK that you can do transfers/DD/Standing Orders from.

    They only allow transfers to current account from savings… but not automated at fixed dates. So you still have to make sure you remember to do the transfer before the DD/SO goes out of the current account. Its so stupid.

    Reply

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