Its My (Your) Data

A few weeks ago, I was talking to an old friend of mine from college (Scott Raymond) and our conversation touched on the topic of online banking. He made a statement that stuck with me and probably will show up in a number of future posts.

He said, "It should be your data," in reference to the online banking that we both use. USAA, for all of its wonderful characteristics, has some odd/annoying limitations on downloading your account activity data. Unless you use Quicken or MS Money, you're pretty much out of luck (and it only goes back six months). Doesn't seem quite right - It Should Be Your Data!

Personal Financial XML
I think we'd all be better off with a standard mark-up language for personal financial information; it would be something like FiXML, which is oriented toward (fixed income derivative) trading. It need not be more complicated than an SGML variant (of which HTML is the most famous child). The standard, if created, could free those stuck with Quicken and MS Money. It could also ensure that all of us would be able to download our personal financial information from a wide array of financial service companies and be able to store it and use it for years to come.

Ideally, this language would be flexible enough to handle both transaction level information (deposit or check written against a checking account) and invoice or statement level information (end of month credit card statement or bill from the cable company). The ability to incorporate both of those things would be quite valuable (I think), as would the ability to include blobs or pictures (think canceled checks).

Who Will Drive This?
It would be great to think that some forward-looking consumer advocacy group, perhaps the Consumers Union (the publishers of Consumers Reports), could find reason to put together interested parties and get a standard published. That, however, is probably way too optimistic.

That leaves me without an obviously standard bearer. Clearly Microsoft and Intuit (publishers of Quicken) have little to no incentive to make something like this happen, with their de facto standards already being adopted by many online services. Who then?