I agree with Lauren – there's so much that the financial industry could do if it allowed its customers to participate more and do something with their data.
Examples: • Prosper: peer to peer banking. http://www.prosper.com/ • Widgets: pay bills more quickly using a widget tied to an account, and perform authorization at the end of the payment. Since 99% of what we do in an online bank is pay bills, this is better for the user, since s/he doesn't have to log in, navigate, etc. on the banks pages • Share your consumption data anonymously and, as a reward, see how everyone else is doing financially, both in terms of what they have right now, their balance over time (visualized well, of course) and their expected savings rate before retirement, etc. • Visualize the impact of higher interest rates on your personal finances and see where you need to cut back • It's easier to see where you need to cut back, of course, because you and other bank users have collectively tagged purchases and over time this is automated • For expense reports, life could be more pleasant as well. Since most receipts are time stamped there might be a way to record with voice or text what the purchase was for, so you can remember all the details later on. You could take a picture of it as well, and use this to organize your expense report later on. • Visually estimate the consequences of borrowing – how much, how soon, with what savings, etc. I firmly believe that most people don't have money problems, they have cash flow problems. If you could see when you'd have a problem with cash flow, you could shore up your finances in time, or avoid a purchase altogether • If these services were available on a mobile device, you could easily enter the cost of a potential purchase and see the cost of different financing options (credit, savings, mortgage, cash) and short-term/long-term impact on your finances • Transfer funds between individuals with your mobile device or via a web browser, without the 4% cut that PayPal takes. • Get access to credit ratings for individuals or companies, wherever you are. You input the dollar amount that they are to pay and they authorize your lookup; the service replies Accept/Check/Deny for that transaction. This way, you get the answer you need without snooping into their finances, they have control over who checks their credit rating and the service itself doesn't divulge sensitive data to third parties • Banks have to keep my data secure, but if I want to share it so that we could do a community study of how people with xyz attributes / work in Q industry / purchase/use X product/service manage their money. If we wanted to, we could monitor the economy far faster than any government unit could, because they have to wait for data to arrive months later, while we could see it in near real-time. By letting users manage their own data and making it easy to share/transform/re-use, we would enable a wide variety of services that are difficult to construct today. Even if we don't share our data, we could still benefit: by mapping out cash flow and earning potential on a graph, we could deal with our finances more intelligently. As I said before, I firmly believe that a lot of people have money problems because they're not able to "see" what's happening with their money, much less with their future earnings. Internet banking is convenient, but unintelligent. Much gain lies in making personal finance and banking more useful, more usable and more intelligent. - Fredrik ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
