It's been nearly 15 years since Stanford Federal Credit Union started offering online banking services to all it's customers and the revolution of internet banking began, in that time the fundamental service offered has remained largely static.The years have seen various developmen... [More]

'Blue sky' thinking in the financial services industry may not be fashionable (quite enough to keep us busy in the here and now), but for a short time I wanted to forget the current troubles and write a short series of posts that look at consumer aspects of the industry beyond the next year ... [More]

Today Chris Skinner wrote about Microsoft Tag, the latest means of using images to represent textual data or URLs.  Chris rightly links these to Quick Response (QR) codes but I think misses one important difference about these tags compared to what we've seen before... [More]

Just a quick link post today but there have been three posts over the past week that have really struck me as some cheery news in difficult times: Barclays pilots Microsoft Surface in new flagship concept branch The reference to Microsoft Surface is almost the least interesting bit of this article (... [More]

My post on creating a client-side mashup between a traditional bank website and Wesabe got noticed by The Bankwatch with Colin's coverage on the idea here.  Colin (quite rightly) points out that the idea is a one-off and requires a degree of technical know-how, if nothing else the idea was to a... [More]

In my last post I described a means of using Grease Monkey and javascript to add extra functionality to web pages and in my previous example I demonstrated adding extra functionality to an online banking page.  At the end of that post I asked the question as to whether this was something that c... [More]

Grease Monkey is a browser plugin that's been around for a long time (2005) which allows you to run scripts against a page and alter the content on the fly.  Scripts are configured individually as to which URLs (either partial or full) they run against and can be turned or off at will.  Th... [More]

Now that thin client computing has become fashionable again (as part of cloud computing) and the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon have released their respective platforms, it's interesting to look at some of the opportunities opening for companies.  There has already been a  coverage ... [More]

People tend not to change their current accounts very often or even at all and there are some pretty obvious reasons why.  The biggest reason I would guess is around apathy, can I be bothered to go through the hassle of changing everything over to a new bank (even if they do promise to do it al... [More]

I use my Egg credit card a fair amount and one of the things I've wanted to try for quite a while is to get some of the data into Wesabe to look at my spending. Unfortunately as there is no option to download statements from Egg which Wesabe's import functionality relies on, there's no easy or obvio... [More]