Bank Feeds: Your Financial Data When and Where You Want It
November 29, 2007 at 4:58 pm by Ehab BandarWith the rise of news feeds delivering just about any kind of information when and how you want it, are bank feeds far behind? Well, the reality is that the future is now. Behold automated bank feeds. Sites like Yodlee, QuickBooks and New Zealand’s Xero work with banks to collect and automatically import your financial transactions with your authorization. It’s a read-only view of your financial activity, whether it’s from your checking or credit card accounts. Your transaction information is then fed into your desired application, which acts as a virtual ‘news reader’ of your information. This is a service that small businesses have had for a while, but it’s slowly coming to consumers thanks to services such as Geezeo, Mint.com, Quicken and Wesabe. The demand for bank feeds should increase as feeds in general become more prevalent, with users getting more control over how they receive their data.
In addition to expanding the notion of news feeds, Facebook has shown that there’s at least four types of personal data: private (my eyes only), friends only, in my network, and for the general public. This can be further broken down into shared data that is read-only versus read-write. Financial data tends to fall mainly into the private category, with read-only access given to a select few ‘friends’ such as your accountant or spouse. Bank feeds provide a way to receive your private financial data as ‘read-only’ that is both secure and encrypted. Because it’s read-only, a fraudster who gets access is limited to what they can do with it — only transaction information would be displayed, and not personal or sensitive information. Ideally, for this to take hold, there would be a universal standard for receiving bank feeds similar to the RSS standard for news feeds. There would then be a standard way to authorize a desired bank feed that can be displayed when and where you want it versus going to a 3rd party such as Yodlee. And given the sensitivity around financial data, a level of control is needed, such as what information gets sent and when.
Some of the benefits of bank feeds are abvious, such as the ability to track your latest transactions and check your balances, but the real benefit lies in what you can do with the data. Bank feeds allow you to:
- monitor fraud activity
- track for unexpected fees
- gain more control over what’s happening to your money
- organize and analyze your finances using whatever Web app or software you like
- standardize transaction information
If bank feeds take hold, it expands the notion of what online banking can be. Online banking then no longer relies on going to your bank’s Website to manage your money. You’d only go to your bank to move money out, which potentially make widespread use of bank feeds toast unless they can be monetized.
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