Comments on: Virtual Bank Accounts

By: michl

michl — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:53:14 +0000

I’m busy building a website where I’d like clients to pay for images via a credit card facility on mt website and have been told by friends that I’m going to need a “virtual bank account” as other countries money needs to be deposited via such an account first.

Does anyone have ideas/knowledge of this ?

By: Terry Thomas

Terry Thomas — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:10:43 +0000

I live in the UK and used to have an account with the Woolwich that provided this service. It was the main reason for choosing to bank with them in the first place. Each sub-account even had a seperate account number, based on a variant of my main account number.

However, they were taken over by Barclays last year, who saw fit to delete all my sub accounts and leave me with one main account again, with no warning, no consultation and no concern.
When I enquired about my missing accounts, I was told this was their policy and that I should consider opening additional bank accounts if I wanted to continue to manage my money in the same way.

Naturally, this is impractical and in today’s environmental climate should be strongly discouraged. I don’t to receive 10 seperate statements in the mail each month, along with all the other associated paperwork.

I was shocked to discover that my account had been bought and sold out in this way. Surely the bank should have been made to honour the system of the bank they bought out and provide similar or alternative services to that bank’s customers.

Needless to say, I am now seeking an alternative bank–hopefully one that meets my needs–and shall be looking into ING Direct (thanks for the tip).

Regardless though, I shall be closing my account and moving out of principal. Any bank that can treat its customers like this is worth staying away from. Any bank that wants to grow its market share should take note.

By: Tony Curcio

Tony Curcio — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:21:04 +0000

I am a wannabe financial planner (currently 1 client, me) that thought of this same idea for a bank to create folders to earmark savings goals as part of a main checking acount. This could take the place of opening up several accounts. Most financial planners recommend creating several accounts for savings goals! I was thinking that banks could offer this to attract more customers. The design does not seem to be that tough and events like NSF in the main account could be setup to draw funds from priority folders. Features could include automatic virtual fund transfers to specific folders, billpay from specific folders, minimum account requirements, etc. I will be approaching my bank with these suggestions.

By: Neal Dench

Neal Dench — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:40:33 +0000

I’ve been doing this with Quicken for years, using its savings goal features. I set up a saving goal for whatever I want, and also, if I want, a monthly direct debit to contribute to it. The advantage of doing it in Quicken, rather than in a “real” account, is that when it comes to reconciling your statement at the end of the month, Quicken is smart enough to know not to include these “virtual” transactions. The disadvantage, of course, is that if you want to physically transfer money from, say, a current account to a savings account, you still have to do that online, and then sub-divide your transfer to savings goals within Quicken, which can be fussy. That said, I literally couldn’t organise my finances without this feature, and it’s probably the only reason I stick with Quicken (I don’t know of any other financial software that offers this ability).

By: Matt Eaton

Matt Eaton — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:44:24 +0000

LloydsTSB let you make online saving accounts instantly online and give them names, and indeed setup monthly transfer if you like. So you can set one up to save for your boat, another for your holiday, a third for…. Still, if you live outside the UK I don’t know if you would want a LloydsTSB account - just hope your bank catches up. Neat idea though

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 14:56:37 +0000

A german bank called Advance Bank had it before. It was indeed great. Now they’re busted. But not because they had that feature I think :-).

By: chris

chris — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:38:05 +0000

This is an awesome idea! I always wished banks would publish transactions made to my account with some sort of password protected RSS feed. Then i could write applications that alert me when money is being withdrawn

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 15:01:23 +0000

I dunno. If I were saving for something specific, I’d just open an account for that purpose and have automatic transfers from my checking account set up.

By: Anton Mellit

Anton Mellit — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:25:01 +0000

Great idea, but I think your remark about the API is much more important. Because there can be tons of features you would like to have, and different people might want different things, banks should let other people to develop the online banking web pages.

By: Alan Peery

Alan Peery — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:13:00 +0000

IngDirect (www.ingdirect.co.uk in the UK) offer a reasonable facsimile to this. You can shuffle the money between accounts immediately, have automatic deposits going into them, and have up to 10 accounts IIRC. You can’t write checks directly out of them–which keeps you from spending the money!