Banking for the iPhone

Banking is an application that has been under development for several months now. At first, it was designed with the goal of getting around Westpac’s annoying password entry mechanism – a nightmare to use on the iPhone. Soon thereafter, we realised that rather than just being a wrapper around UIWebView, it would be kind of neat to implement a native iPhone application that acted as an appealing and easy-to-use interface to the rather archaic banking websites that we have the displeasure of dealing with in Australia.

Basically, we wanted to create an equivalent of the superb application offered by Mint.com, sadly unavailable to Australian users. Better yet, we wanted full transaction history for all our accounts spread across numerous banks and the ability to make transfers and payments from the phone in a matter of seconds, not minutes.

Having only accounts with Westpac and Commonwealth Bank between us, we proceeded to sign up with ANZ, St. George and NAB. We learned a lot about the security mechanisms implemented by different banks (or lack thereof), funny (and scary) password standards and bloated HTML. Nevertheless, we arrived at the following:

We’re quite pleased with the application now and believe that you will be, too. That said, we realise that everybody has different preferences and this is realised through the numerous options available from the built-in Settings application on the iPhone. Options include:

• Auto-updating of accounts upon application load.
• Warning if account update or payment is taking place over cellular network.
• Online help is automatically loaded.
• Whether authorisation is never required, required on on start up, third party payments, all transactions or all of the above.
• How long the authorisation PIN should be.
• How many incorrect login attempts should be allowed before erasing all user data.
• Whether to cache account data on the iPhone.
• Whether to send diagnostic information to the developers (i.e. us!) to improve the application.

We think that these options will cater to most people’s preferences. Do note that if a malicious user does gain access to your device, turning off authorisation is only possible after authorising in the first place — it would be somewhat superfluous otherwise!

The application has been through open beta testing for about five months thanks to the fantastic users of the Whirlpool forum. Without their trust, support and ideas for additional functionality, the application would probably never have reached its current state. The application has also been submitted to Apple and should hopefully be available soon!