Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Online Banking needs to expand into full blown finance applications
Net banking is improving daily and has rapidly gained acceptance, despite huge increases in phishing attempts, virus alerts and other scarey things in the media. This is a good thing - it didnt seem that long ago that we were all queueing up at the post office or writing out numerous cheques each payday, but now it is so much simpler.
I'd like to see the banks bring out much more advanced applications - everything from budgetting, commentary for your tax return, as well as the collection of useful little finance utilities that are floating around. They need to do some serious integration (maybe even buy out one of the existing Finance software vendors - Quickbooks, MYOB, etc) and give the customers full access to all the features. The results would help both parties:
- customers would have a great application to REALLY manage their funds/bills/savings
- banks would have less people switching banks, because it is a pain to switch software
Other web portals have tried this, but this is doomed to failure - how on earth is it logical to export data from your bank, fiddle with it in excel or your finance application and then upload to a website to have easy access. No way - not ever going to catch on because:
1) do you trust this 3rd party web portal to keep your information private? No.
2) do you like importing/exporting data around the place? No.
Using a finance planner on the banks website is so completely safe (you trust the bank [ if not, why did you give them your money?]) and convenient (all your transaction data is there already) that it is suprising that they haven't already moved faster on this.
I am looking forward to trying them out, and if you know of a bank which already has an advanced finance application, let me know.
[PET PEEVE] One thing that banks aren't doing so well at is the upgrade of the new graphical ATM's - instead of waiting a normal 0.3 seconds for the keys to respond there is now a annoyingly noticable delay of 0.6-1.0 seconds after pressing a key to getting the screen to respond. What the HELL is that about? It looks pretty? BIG DEAL - I am in a queue trying to withdraw money and I dont give a shit about nice pictures or worthless advents especially when it impacts on the funcationality. [END PET PEEVE]
I'd like to see the banks bring out much more advanced applications - everything from budgetting, commentary for your tax return, as well as the collection of useful little finance utilities that are floating around. They need to do some serious integration (maybe even buy out one of the existing Finance software vendors - Quickbooks, MYOB, etc) and give the customers full access to all the features. The results would help both parties:
- customers would have a great application to REALLY manage their funds/bills/savings
- banks would have less people switching banks, because it is a pain to switch software
Other web portals have tried this, but this is doomed to failure - how on earth is it logical to export data from your bank, fiddle with it in excel or your finance application and then upload to a website to have easy access. No way - not ever going to catch on because:
1) do you trust this 3rd party web portal to keep your information private? No.
2) do you like importing/exporting data around the place? No.
Using a finance planner on the banks website is so completely safe (you trust the bank [ if not, why did you give them your money?]) and convenient (all your transaction data is there already) that it is suprising that they haven't already moved faster on this.
I am looking forward to trying them out, and if you know of a bank which already has an advanced finance application, let me know.
[PET PEEVE] One thing that banks aren't doing so well at is the upgrade of the new graphical ATM's - instead of waiting a normal 0.3 seconds for the keys to respond there is now a annoyingly noticable delay of 0.6-1.0 seconds after pressing a key to getting the screen to respond. What the HELL is that about? It looks pretty? BIG DEAL - I am in a queue trying to withdraw money and I dont give a shit about nice pictures or worthless advents especially when it impacts on the funcationality. [END PET PEEVE]
