Have you seen Mint.com? If you haven’t you should check it out, because it is awesome. Not so fast though, Mint along with a number of other web based financial analytics apps are not supported by Canadian banks – yet. This seems like a no brainer to me. If one of the big Canadian banks offered online functionality like this to their customers i would seriously consider switching.
I think there is an opportunity here to really innovate the online banking experience in Canada, it’ll be interesting to see who’s going to make it happen.
I’d love to see Mint integrate with canadian banks too, but I don’t think it will happen for a long long time, if ever. Especially now with banks making only 4 or 5 billion instead of the expected 6, I bet they’re cutting back on spurious IT projects.
One of the problems is that a bank can’t get one or two superstar programmers to whip up an API. There’s just way too much oversight and security to worry about, too many committees and analysts picking it apart to see the value
Wesabe (where I work) does provide support for Canadian banks, and several of them are now fully automated with our Automatic Uploader (no download required). Let me know if your bank isn’t supported and I’ll see if we can add it.
Marc Hedlund, CEO, Wesabe
marc@wesabe.com
My current version of quicken doesn’t direct download from TD thanks to additional security. Our weak state of financial literacy means most people wouldn’t use financial software. The level of trust required for personal finance in the cloud is much higher.