Before anyone laughs at the title of this post, let me try to persuade you that this is potentially a great idea.

I myself hate having to check into my bank account to see what movements have taken place. Its time consuming when all I want is a list of all movements since I last checked in as well as balances of my various accounts.

First National Bank provides something like this where they email you any changes to your account or even sms it to you. Banks in the UK offer no such service. So the idea of RSS being used springs to mind. I must credit this idea to Grant though.

Wouldn’t it be great having an RSS aggregator pulling an RSS feed directly from your bank with the latest movements in the XML feed? I think it would. Aside from the security concerns and actual implementation details, this is a good idea.

Unfortunately as RSS is a pull mechanism, this presents us with some major security concerns. No bank in the world is going to publish RSS feeds to anyone without proving that the account is yours. And there is no way currently of authenticating yourself against an RSS feed. Well there is via normal HTTP authentication but banks are going to demand that you authenticate without their digital signatures. And I definitely don’t want to have to continually type my login details over and over. Anyone hear of public/private key pairs? :P

But if an authentication method was devised, RSS could be vaulted into a new market completely.

I would love to hear comments on this post, so please feel free.