ANZ Money Manager....

ANZ Bank recently launched a new product called 'Money Manager'. The aim is that it would take a 'read-only' snap shot of all your bank transactions and then display them visually -- summarize the data -- and potentially scare you half-to-death once you know the real state of affairs. It potentially will have links to Doctors and other medical practitioners.

The idea is not new, this has been done quite well by a product called 'Mint' in US. That service gets just about every award there is for online financial management tools.
---

So, what can I tell you about ANZ Money Manager? The site is pretty much a work in progress (it even spouts the Beta logo) --- but it has some very interesting design choices.

1. When you attempt to learn about the service -- it spends about a couple of geological era's actually loading a massive Flash animation. It has a cute robot (not the best metaphor for financial matters btw). They pretty much broke the first rule of web design -- making it rather hard and painful for anyone remotely interested in their product.

2. The Flash animation sadly now attempts to actually layout and render 'text'. Yup -- they decided that HTML was not good enough, and the entire product information is actually presented from inside the Flash applet. (Thankfully, I found a tiny link at the bottom of the page, that says 'Plain HTML'. My recommendation if anyone from ANZ is reading this blog -- please please make the 'Plain HTML' the default page that anyone sees.

3. You want to learn about a product -- so one would expect to see some nice images, screen shots -- anything worth actually looking at. ANZ has decided that they shall provide all content in 'text' -- embedded inside a Flash applet. Yup -- the only animation/image is a silly robot that makes weird noises at random intervals. I'm certain that the designer was inspired by the 'MS Office Robot' (which was an option that you could use to switch from the paper-clip help dude). Sadly, it just does not work -- the whole thing is a woeful mess in need of some serious adult supervision.

4. Thankfully, the actual site is much better laid out. No more Flash applets or robots. The form that they display for Registering your account seems to have been tested on IE 6, so all other browsers beware -- it does not properly render the page.

5. I have not been brave as yet to provide them with my Netbank login details. They assure me, that it is safe! The technically interesting aspect is that they are 'scraping' the website of other online banks in order to get the information that they need. This would mean that they did not get back-end readonly access from external parties. It would quite a challenge to keep updating the scraping software as other external parties update their online banking systems. I would actually go as far as saying that this is going to be quite messy to maintain in the long-term. I hope they can reach read-only data sharing agreements soon -- they actually should have most of this underlying infrastructure already in place information since their ATM's talk to each other and they can transfer funds between each other.
---

So will it work! ... My take is that it would be fine for ANZ customers, but scraping financial information from 100 different web sites it not a viable long-term solution. It may be possible and something you can push along for a period of time -- but certainly not a long term solution that you can rely on. We are *not* scraping weather information, sports scores or real-estate listing (I have written simple software to do these myself) -- we are talking about financial data. Any minor errors can cause a lot of heart-ache for far too many people -- not to mention the support nightmare.

I'm happy that this option is starting to become available -- maybe the 'Which Bank' will notice :)

-- rv






3.