Macquarie Bank has become one of the first local financial services providers to provide screen scraping facilities with the rollout of a website to customers on the weekend.
Macquarie Bank has become one of the first local financial services providers to provide screen scraping facilities with the rollout of a website to customers on the weekend.
Launched by Macquaries subsidiary, Financial Enrichment, the site, enrichment.com.au, allows customers to screen scrape, or combine their online banking and broking services and reporting under one set of access details at one internet site.
No charges will be levied and customers of the ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Suncorp Metway, BankWest, Macquarie Bank, American Express, Bendigo Bank and AMP Bank will be able to access the service.
Macquarie Bank head of eDivision Rahn Wood says more banks will be added to the list in the months ahead as well as other product lines including managed funds, superannuation and share broking.
Wood says customers of National Australia Bank (NAB) and St George Bank were not able to participate in the account aggregation service at present because of technical difficulties.
Bank transactions will still need to be conducted by users through each bank’s own website as the aggregation site would not take responsibility for this part of the service.
The technology behind the aggregation service will use high level encryption technology with all access details held seperately from the site in a ‘pin vault.’
The “screen-scraping” technology has already transformed internet banking in the United States, where it’s estimated that 7 million people will be using it by 2003.
However, there is still wide spread speculation in regards to the security of screen scrapping schemes. Many claiming the services are leaving themselves wide open to internet hackers.
