online banking guidelines

Overview

This page is about recommendations for online banking web sites. We don't currently know if there are any existing recommended standards, but most banking web sites seem to fall short in several areas.

Proposal

The following recommendations are a proposal by a frequent user of online banking services. Unless there are any technical objections to these, we would like to see customers encouraging their banks to adopt these standards.

• online ledger should show balance after each transaction, rather than just the current balance; this helps with reconciling.
• user should not be logged out while they are still doing something; this includes downloading check images or statements.
• check images:
  • 200dpi color PNG or high-quality JPEG
  • images should be downloadable in batches, e.g. by date range or by statement; downloading individual images is very tedious
  • bank statements should include images of checks, at least as an option the user may select via the web site