Idea: If the banks took the Gmail approach to Internet Banking.
Like all great ideas this one struck me at the oddest time. I won’t tell you exactly where I was or what I was doing when it hit me but I have been thinking about this ever since.
What if the banks took the Gmail approach to Internet Banking?
By this I mean using labels to allocate funds and filters to automate the management of your money.
Like millions of people I have a mortgage account within which my salary gets paid directly into. The more money that I leave in my mortgage account the lower my interest repayments are.
But I also pay myself and wife a monthly allowance into individual accounts, pay bills and move money into savings accounts thus lowering the total amount of money sitting my mortgage account and increasing my interest repayments.
How great would it then be if I didn’t have to move money from my mortgage account into separate spending or savings accounts? Brilliant.
By having the ability to keep all of my money in the one account and simply label portions of funds into virtual accounts that could be linked to my key card. All funds would still remain in the one account however the use of labels would allow me to separate my monthly spending money, savings and loan repayments.
One card to rule them all.
Rather than having to carry around a credit card and ATM card you could use the three account options to link to different labels within your account.
Savings could point to my “Allowance” labeled funds,
Cheque could point to my “Savings” labeled funds and,
Credit could point to unallocated funds and my home loans “Line of Credit” feature.
Automating your money.
Every fortnight my salary is deposited into my account. Gmail’s filters feature would let me automatically allocate funds upon deposit.
I could setup a filter to automatically label a portion of any deposits from my employer as “Loan repayments”, another portion as “Allowance”, and the remaining funds would simply be listed as “Unallocated”.
Filters could also be setup to automatically label funds from specific depositors, above or below certain amounts or by date range each month.
On thinking about this even further there are actually a lot of Google products that this would fit in beautifully with:
Search - its what Google does best. Search every deposit, withdrawal and transfer ever made on your account
Google Calendar Integration - schedule payment reminders and time sensitive transfers.
Mobile Access - your money anywhere anytime.
Google Docs Integration - take your household budget spreadsheet to a whole new level with live account data.
Google Maps Integration - visually track your expenditure. Your monthly statement could take on a whole new dimension by plotting points on Google Maps for each purchase location and ATM withdrawal. Great for those of us who look at out balance at the end of the month and think “I have no idea where that money went!”.
AdSense, AdWords & Google Checkout - Of course!
And the list goes on! Of course you would have to trust your hard earned dosh to the Big G to get all of these great extras but hey as I have said in a previous post, Google owns me already!
Sorry for the massive tangent but iIthink I actually got myself a little excited at the possibilities!
But to get back to the original path of this article, the ability to keep all of my funds within the one account would greatly reduce the total amount of interest that I had to pay each month thus greatly reduce the length of my loan.
Now of course there is the argument that the banks certainly wouldn’t want to be reducing the amount of interest that their customers had to pay as it would significantly reduce their profits. However would they not also see an increase in the total amount of funds sitting on their books at any one time?
I am probably also not alone in hoping that once my first mortgage has been paid off to a significant degree I will apply for a larger mortgage to purchase another property, keeping myself in debt with the bank for a longer period of time.
Food for thought?
Tags: gmail, google, google calendar, google docs, google maps, internet banking
