Taking e-Banking to The Next Level
by Antti Akonniemi
Here’s something that was unfortunately left out in our discussion with Jussi Muurikainen in this particular Bisnesmiehet episode (in finnish).
Although Finnish banks have been very positive about Balancion, one thing that they ought to think about is building APIs. Not open APIs but APIs that would allow 3rd parties to create applications based on the customer data and even on bank’s features. Banks have a lot on their plates and building super cool e-Banking solutions for technorati may not be their first priority. Why not allow other people to do the work?
As Jussi says – Finns were the first to do e-Banking. How about if we would be the first ones to make it more open?
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Seeing how the Finnish [scandinavian, whatevever] banks act in the online world I wouldn’t hold my breath over them offering API’s.
For example enabling online payments is a complete mess due to each bank offering their own services and switching to electronic billing requires a ton of work. It wasn’t long a go when Sampo sent their ecommerce password codes on a floppy disk! It was great fun to go to basement finding old computer junk with a floppy drive just to get an ecommerce site up and running (just until now they switched to CD-ROMS, thank god).
But there is always hope? ;)
I’m such a e-commerce newbie that I’ve only got CDs from Sampo :D
Great idea! I think I’ll talk to banking people about this.. :) Change is possible but slow.
It should be noted that most banks actually have “APIs” and have been offering them for years. Usually they are very scary. For example Nordea has offered the exact same thing as long as I have known anything about the subject (2004) but probably much longer. It’s essentially a way to get the bank statement in a proprietary text-based format over a proprietary communications layer that transfers data over unsecure FTP. If I remember right, the spec for all of this was around 400 pages long and the authentication methods didn’t either exactly reek of security.
The banks would very likely benefit immensely from having smartly built secure XML based APIs simply in terms of big clients that would appreciate a thing like this, especially in the IT sector. But apparently it’s not very easy to get the message accross.
There was some discussions some time ago suggesting that Apple or Google would have easily enough liquid capital to start a bank.
I wonder which will happen first. In either case, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Thanks for the clarification, Mikael! Those “APIs” allow banks to communicate, right? I meant APIs that allow implementation of the same features as in their current e-Banking solution. As in “Transfer 50 euros from Antti’s account to Mikael’s account”
I’m pretty sure they have that kind of functionality too. More precisely, a way to pay bills in batches programmatically, but implementation is equally scary and has all kinds of limitations. And obviously, none of this is by no means free.
Another big problem with these kinds of situations is the current interpretation of Finnish money laundering laws, which dictates that the customer-SP relationship should be a direct one, and any middle man type company would be illegal.
Still I think this could be doable, because bank would handle money and there wouldn’t be “a middle man”. It would just be a new front-end.
Think of e-banking for senior citizens or “Your first e-Bank” :)
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[...] a year ago I wrote about Taking e-Banking to the Next Level. Now TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre has started a project where the goal is [...]