Bank of America Online Banking Gets Personal
August 1, 2007 at 3:57 am by Ehab BandarBank of America online banking now lets you personalize the transaction information that appears online. Now “Check# 123″ can become “Uncle Joe” and “MACYS WEB PMT DES IPD:000″ can be magically transformed into something short and sweet like “Macy’s”.
Although Quicken has been doing this for some time, this is Bank of America’s first foray into providing customers with this functionality. It also signals a relatively new trend in online banking: providing more meaningful transaction information to customers through automation and user-generated content. By meaningful, I mean transaction information that:
- matches how customers actually refer to a specific transaction. Like a checkbook registry entry, information is immediately accessible and personalized.
- is tagged with associated categories that are customized to match a customer’s own system of organizing their finances.
- is enhanced with additional information, such as a memo, that adds valuable information when trying to understand or find a specific transaction.
In short, a meaningful transaction is any transaction that corresponds to how people actually use their money, and not something that is ambiguously generated from a financial institution. Using this criteria, Bank of America’s effort provides only a glimpse of what’s possible. It also has its faults, such as losing the original description in case a customer wanted to refer to it in the future. Another failing is for customers who use offline tools (e.g., Quicken, MS Money) to manage their finances as the edited description is reverted back to the original description when downloading or synchronizing the information. Also, as far as I can tell, paper bank statements also retain the original description. But given that this effort is only the beginning, I’ll keep this short and sweet.
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