It boggles my mind that the banks haven’t figured out how to make their websites more useful than they are. Why are these sites limited to online versions of bank tellers?
Here’s what I want my bank’s site to provide:
- Allow me to categorize or tag every transaction. I want to mark that Subway is “Eating out”.
- Learn from previous transactions and automatically suggest classifications for me. If I marked “89328374 Ontario Inc.” as car repairs two months ago there is a good chance it goes into the same category this month.
- Summarize the totals for each category and show trends. Am I spending more on eating out every month?
- Allow me to set targets or thresholds for each category and send me notifications if I cross them. If my budget is $300/month for eating out I want to know when I’m beyond that.
The banks already have access to all of my account activity and I don’t want to provide a third party, especially one outside of Canada, with my online banking credentials to get this functionality.
Why would a bank build this?
- It provides an incentive to move all of your accounts to one bank.
- I’d switch banks to get these features so I’m sure others would too.
