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.

really important

• 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
• email user an alert when balance drops below zero (include links to recommendations for future prevention, e.g. overdraft protection) rather than sending out a postcard which often arrives days later (email is far cheaper -- why do they even bother with the postcard?)
  • An email alert when balance drops below some user-set limit would also be nice; some credit cards have a similar feature (emails you when balance exceeds user-set limit)

would be nice

• there should be an option to email check images to the user as checks come in
• there should be options to email the user when transactions come in -- with specific information about the transaction (dollar amount, date, recipient), not just "your criteria for emailing you were met, here's your email, have a nice day" like Chase Mastercard does.

notes

• 2009-03-10 BB&T has stopped providing a daily balance even on their printed statements; this seems to be a cheap ploy to get their customers to buy Microsoft Money Quicken* in order to be able to balance their accounts. See htwiki:2009-02-09 webmail to BB&T. (*as of 2009-09-02)