Online Banking: Some places are still in the Dark Ages
It seems that when money is involved in things, we get stuck in the dark ages, for no apparent reason.
Let's look briefly at my credit union: They're a tiny, one-branch operation, with phenomenal customer service, great rates, and is, if you visit in person, a great little bank. When things leave the branch, however, they start to crumble. Only in the past five years did they introduce an online banking system. Initially, you had to request the account be activated inside the bank, and if you didn't log in every few weeks, your account would be deactivated and you would have to ask them to reactivate it. Fortunately, those provisions are gone, but they're still using the same "Virtual Branch" software.
The problem is that everything inside the Virtual Branch, stays in the Virtual Branch. The only way to get data out is to export transactions for a certain block of time at a time. You must manually specify the range, then you export that range. The up shot is that this file can be imported into most financial management software (like Quicken). However, it is incompatible with Mint. After speaking with someone who has authority in these provisions at my bank, they have confirmed that the only way to get data out of the bank is through these exports, and they have no plans to add any other communication methods to the system.
Then there's the other side of the equation: Mint. Mint seems, on the surface, quite modern. Plug in user names and passwords and it pulls in your data, and does all sorts of analytical things with that data. However, if you don't do things that way, you are, again, in the dark. Mint does not allow importing data through uploads. This is extremely odd, since Intuit's other produces, like TurboTax and QuickBooks do support importing information. QuickBooks also supports the BlackBerry, and Mint has no plans to ever support it (despite the demand for it). This would, ordinarily, mean you'd need to manually input the information. However, Mint doesn't allow that either.
This makes half of the interesting things in Mint useless, because the net worth calculator is way off (since it's not taking into account the money I have in the bank), I cannot track goals at all (one of the more useful features), and budgeting is rather broken, since Mint can't track my paychecks. I'm forced to enter important bank transactiosn as cash, and keep track of which transactions are actually cash, which are check, and manually enter a lot more information. This added layer of complexity defeats half the purpose of Mint, which was to simplify things and automate much of your budgeting.
This also ruins the approachability of Mint for someone like my mother, who has not one, but two services that aren't supported by Mint, and doesn't find interfaces most of us consider intuitive to be all that intuitive. Because of the complexity of the systems she will have to invent around Mint, in order to use it, it might just be more worth her time to do a budget on pencil and paper.
I mean, there is a lot of really great stuff being done with online banking, and there's no doubt that online banking has changed the way many people manage their money. But why is it when something goes wrong that everything goes back to the dark ages?
