Posted on 2009-09-30 18:31 UTC by . Status: Under consideration, Categories: Utilities, User Experience.
So I don't think I'm alone in wanting to be able to see my account balances at a glance (this is why they invented mobile banking). I think it would be really useful to have a widget on the desktop which shows an overview of your accounts and their balances, maybe updated once a day or on demand, or something.
I figure it would be a simple text output:
CHQ1 $160.54
SAV1 $1401.76
RENT $600.00
BILLS $55.02
Obviously depending on how many accounts you have..
Posted on 2009-09-30 18:39 UTC by .
Most banks and credit unions these days supply a SMS based mobile banking system, where you text say, "bal all" (balance all) to their 5 digit (in north america) sms number. They then return a message like (example from vancity):
Balance
BAL1: $xx.xx
BAL2: $xx.xx
BAL3: $xxx.xx
Up to 6 in one message.
Theoretically you could have the device parse the incoming message and store the data for the widget. A timer could be run to send a "bal all" sms message to the specified number once in a while to retrieve new data. As most people have extremely high text plans (1000+) this shouldnt be an issue.
The interface and regexing this data is a whole other kettle of fish, but probably the easiest part.
