Internet Banking is pretty basic, and I’ve had the, uh, pleasure of using the Internet Banking facilities provided by all the major banks over the years.
What I would like is an Internet Banking web application that goes a step further that actually helps me manage my money and budget.
What I would like to see is the concept of virtual accounts where I can create as many bank account partitions as I want to help me dice and slice my money. I would love to be able to create a temporary virtual account for “Car registration” that I can put money into to save to pay for car registration. I would love if I could set a due date and required balance on that account so when I log in Internet Banking could tell me I need to put at least $50 in that virtual account to get it back on track so I can meet the savings target.
Perhaps I could set up automatic debit to move an amount of money into that virtual account either regularly or whenever it detects a deposit that exceeds a certain threshold (ie my fortnightly salary).
I would love it if I could tag sums of money and earmark them for specific purposes. Money for car servicing, birthday presents, insurance, dental check-up, groceries, fuel, parking. I struggle with budgeting. The disconnect between how I want to manage my money and what I have to work with (ie one account that just has the label “Savings” and a dollar sign followed by some digits) means I’m not very efficient or rigorous with money management. It’s partly a personality and behaviour flaw but also a design opportunity.
Of course as this is all virtual it’s all handled within Internet Banking. Nothing needs to change with the underlying banking infrastructure. If I have five virtual accounts with $100 in each then as far as EFTPOS is concerned it’s still just a single account with $500.
Would you find something like this useful? There’s probably already something like this out there – which banks are doing it and how effective is it? As with all software there’s scope to implement this really horridly.
Nathanael, this is EXACTLY what I want too (And I recently mentioned it to a guy that is rebuilding the Westpac banking site at the moment and he had no idea about even the concept of tagging, so I don’t think it’s ever going to happen).
This is exactly how I manage my budget, but I do it through an excel spreadsheet.
It’d be nice if my bank ANZ did something like this as part of their “We live in your world” campaign which I fear is just a superficial rebranding. Shame we can’t hold banks responsible for how they spend our bank fees!