August 7, 2008
The death of statements?
I’ve just finished writing a piece for Online Banking Review looking at the growth in marketing and uptake of online statements. There’s no doubt consumers are warming to the idea, but I wonder when we’ll get to the point where statements (online or otherwise) are irrelevant.
Consumer focused sites like Wesabe and Mint are already doing a great job of delivering consumers information in a much more user-friendly way. We’ll be hearing from Wesabe VP of marketing at Online Banking Review’s Innovative Marketing forum coming up in Sydney on August 28.
Last week I was treated to an online demo of US software firm Jwaala’s MoneyTracker tool, and it certainly lives up to their claim that it’s the future of Internet banking.
The natural language search and categorisation of transactions on offer from institutions using Jwaala is leaps and bounds ahead of any local Internet banking offering I’ve seen. Jwaala also delivers account aggregation, transaction alerts via RSS, SMS and email, an electronic document vault, and budgeting tools.
“We’re moving from the one way Internet where you could show people limited information to a two way Internet where people pull the information they want from your system” says Kelly Dowell, vice president of business development with Jwaala.
Retail customers aren’t the only ones winning from the trend towards aggregated financial information. Kiwi software start-up Xero is preparing to target the small business market in Australia. Xero’s online accounting system is designed to help small business people manage their transactions, invoices and GST. Bank statement data can be automatically uploaded into the Xero dashboard on a daily basis and business owners can use the tool to generate and export real-time reports for their accountants/advisers.
Which poses the question, why bother delivering online statements if customers can pull all the information they need in a format they want from online banking tools like MoneyTracker and Xero?
Written by: Charis
Filed Under: The Better Banking Blog
Tags: account aggregation, Jwaala, Mint, online statements, wesabe, Xero
Trackback URL: http://www.bankingreview.com.au/2008/08/the-death-of-statements.html/trackback
James Webster
August 9, 2008 at 9:43 am
I am a big fan of Wesabe, but I’m not sure it is the end of the statement. I am still getting my transaction data from my bank into Wesabe by way of a ‘statement’, albeit one that I can choose to download in OFX format. I’m not really sure how statements are going to disappear; even if I log in to my bank’s website, select a date range of transactions and download as CSV/OFX, etc, surely this is still a statement?
What would be ‘cool’ would be a bank that would send transaction data as it is received immediately to Wesabe, via some technology like RSS/XMPP, etc. However, even though this is read-only the privacy/security implications are big enough factors to discourage this.
I have asked the question; ‘where is the web service API for my bank account?’ and Wesabe is partially the answer but for now, most online banking websites (Australian ones are particularly bad in my experience) are ‘roach motels’.
james wade
August 12, 2008 at 12:22 pm
I too echo the sentiment that I doubt we are going to see the end of the statement anytime soon… Isn’t it required by law for institutions to issue a statment?
Having said that, it is quite likely that Wesabe et al may well end up replacing the simple ‘transaction listing’ function in IB.
This is a little off topic, and I’m not sure if I’m speaking out of turn, but personally I’d love some critical analysis of all this new stuff you talk about.
For me, that would add endless amounts of value to this blog.
Rawlo
August 14, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Four of the major New Zealand banks now offer support for Mint. Three of the four banks are owned by Australian banks, and the market is notoriously used as a testing ground for new technology. It will be interesting to see how long before Mint is available to Australian customers.
NZ Banks on Mint so far:
ANZ, Bank of New Zealand, Westpac, TSB.
alan
September 18, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I love Wesabe to bits but yeah, banks need to learn to work with startups like Wesabe and push the OFX data to them in the background or make it available via an API. Or, the banks themselves can out-sushi Wesabe, becoming the aggregator of all my financial stuff themselves. I don’t see either coming very soon, but all it takes is a bit more pressure on banks, and bugger me if there hasn’t been an awful lot of that in the last week!