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Virtual Bank Accounts

Comments (21)

1. I think you may have a long way to go on that Mega mansion with only $2500.

   October 3rd, 2007 J. Dunbar

2. I honestly don’t understand why a bank doesn’t just buy out or partner with one of the dozen ‘manage your money online’ startups. Like Mint for example. I’d trust them a lot more if it was my own banks product.

   October 5th, 2007 Emile B

3. Nate,
   I think your “Pseudo Sub-Account” idea is great!

   I hope my bank implements this feature soon (hint! hint! WAMU).

   But please let me know when another bank implements this and I will definitely switch banks.

   Eddie G

   November 8th, 2007 Eddie G

4. [...] clipped from http://www.ideashower.com [...]

   November 8th, 2007 Mr. Banker, How about giving us virtual bank accounts? « A1Mega’s Favorites

5. I think this idea is great, I’ve found out myself it’s always easier to save for certain stuff if I can see progress. Like the satisfying feeling of shaking around a pigy bank filled to the brim with coins. Too bad banks lack a lot of imagination ..

   November 9th, 2007 Eric

6. The idea is certainly sound. Banks, of course, would like you to get another savings account to do that, because they’re stuck in an old way of monetizing your relationship with them which says more accounts mean more money.

   From the users perspective, it makes total sense. A couple wrinkles come up, like if you had your main account, and a couple sub accounts within it, if you “overdraw” the amount in the “main bucket” does the charge pull from your “dream house” or your “trip to fiji”?

   November 9th, 2007 Joe Tennis

7. For big legacy systems of record, it’s a question of where the data lives and what’s authoritative. You’re talking about a subaccounting system that uses the primary account as an omnibus account. Big banks hate that kind of stuff — because it’s not real. As Joe10 says, you don’t really want subaccounts — all you want are tags and classifications. Real subaccounts create real problems. Tags are just a way of making literal the way you think about your money.

   November 11th, 2007 Cliff Gerrish

8. I have an account with a bank in New Zealand (RaboPlus) that lets me do this. I can create up to 10 “accounts” under my main account, each having a unique suffix but with the rest of the account number the same. Accounts can be created online (in fact the whole bank is online only, apart from a phone help desk), and then money can be transferred electronically from any account with other banks to these accounts just like I normally could.

   November 13th, 2007 Joefish

9. Aren’t you describing a “Club Account”? It is a seperate account that you can transfer to as often as you like, you can take out of as often as you like and you can name it whatever you like. I would look at a CU as apposed to bank for features like that. Banks are geared towards businesses, CU’s are geared towards you. A thought!

   November 15th, 2007 shaun

10. Great. I’ve thought about the exact same thing in the past, I kinda modeled in my mind as “folders” in my bank account.

    Since is almost purely a presentation attribute, should be trivial to implement for a bank that already develops its own web interface. And the contextual ads thing is just a great idea…

    November 20th, 2007 Michael

11. Hey! Your virtual bank account idea is already available! You can get this with a Merrill Lynch Cash Management Account:

    Earmark assets for specific needs and goals
    —
    You can establish CMA SubAccounts to segregate funds for specific investment goals, such as education, supplemental retirement savings, emergencies or travel.

    http://askmerrill.ml.com/publish/marketing_centers/products/bb001_MerrillLynchCMA/

    November 27th, 2007 Jason

12. 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!

    November 27th, 2007 Alan Peery

13. 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.

    November 28th, 2007 Anton Mellit

14. 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.

    December 1st, 2007 Scott

15. 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

    December 19th, 2007 chris

16. 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 :-).

    December 25th, 2007 Michael

17. 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

    January 10th, 2008 Matt Eaton

18. 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).

    February 13th, 2008 Neal Dench

19. 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.

    March 3rd, 2008 Tony Curcio

20. 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.

    April 15th, 2008 Terry Thomas

21. 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 ?

    August 14th, 2008 michl