InformationWeek

January 8, 2001

A Legacy Tale Of Online Banking

It's not hard to write about the legacy computing issues of large companies, but when those legacy issues affect my personal computing, it's a different matter altogether. My personal legacy scenario is a mystery that involves online bill-payment software, the Apple Macintosh, and a few high-tech companies, but the problems I encountered could just as well have happened to any business. The upshot is that I'm stuck with 10 years worth of important data trapped inside a software application that will never be updated, and I'm fighting an uphill battle to find vendors who will support my platform of choice. Sound familiar? If I were a business, I'd hire consultants and start to work on migrating my data. Instead, I get to write about it.

My main beef is with CheckFree Corp., a company that owns, by some estimates, 80% of the consumer bill-payment market. I've been a loyal user of CheckFree for 10 years, having signed on with its dial-up bill-payment software in 1991. In those days, CheckFree was state-of-the-art for consumer bill payment, and CheckFree's bill-payment software was a fine application. It was written for CheckFree by Togis Inc. in Columbus, Ohio (Togis has since disbanded). In fact, it still runs today quite nicely in 68K emulation mode on my PowerPC Macintosh.

In the late 1990s, it became clear that it would be far easier for CheckFree to offer server-based bill payment for consumers. The new method required only that a user point his or her Web browser at the CheckFree site to manage online bill payments. In 1998, CheckFree announced it would discontinue its dial-up software application in favor of the new browser-based method. Soon after, though, it mysteriously backpedaled and decided to keep supporting its dial-up users but not add any new dial-up users. That would have been OK, except that the Macintosh version of the software, which I had been using for almost eight years, offered no way of exporting the bill-payment data. Users of the Windows version of the software were luckier; they could export to Quicken Interchange Format, now a commonly used format for consumer banking information.

CheckFree's support department still shrugs its collective shoulders and apologizes, but offers no solution for users of its Macintosh bill-payment software other than to continue to use it, or to abandon their stored bill-payment data and move on. Why is this? CheckFree insiders I've talked to say that CheckFree has no Macintosh developers in-house and that they simply don't want to deal with the migration problem--and it's not much of a problem. The data files containing the bill payment records are in common dBase format. I estimate that it would require a junior Macintosh programmer about two weeks to write a converter application that would translate the data files from dBase to Quicken Interchange Format.

I'm also not discounting an anti-Macintosh bias that exists in some vertical industries, banking among them. This is particularly distressing because the Macintosh is perhaps more viable now as a business platform than it has been in 10 years. While Apple, along with other PC hardware vendors, has been stung by the recent downturn in sales, it still managed a respectable year, selling more than 1 million machines in the third quarter alone. At this week's MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, faster and more powerful Macintosh hardware will be introduced, and Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit will announce an important desktop application for business users. MacOS X, Apple's next-generation operating system, will ship soon, and, despite some reservations I have with the new graphical user interface, MacOS X will finally deliver the file system and network performance that the Mac desperately needs.

I'm mystified by CheckFree's action, or rather its lack of action, but I know when it's time to move on, and I thought that I was ready at the end of 2000. Why did I wait two years? I still think it makes sense to have my records stored and managed locally instead of on someone else's server. Theoretically, having my data stored locally should make it easier for me to switch to a different bill-payment or online banking vendor.

Using my desktop system for local storage and management of data seemed like a good idea in 1991, and it seems like an even better idea today. When CheckFree, Microsoft, and Intuit authored the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) in 1997, local storage and management of consumer financial data was likely on their minds. OFX is a complete specification for the exchange of financial information that is written using Standard General Markup Language (XML was not available at the time). The newer versions of Quicken and Microsoft Money have OFX built in, so they are capable of directly connecting with a financial institution to exchange data. Users get the benefit of the rich interface of these applications, and online banks don't have to support as many users hitting their servers for storage and financial data manipulation.

Recently, more online banks have started offering OFX capability. I was intrigued when one of the new crop of virtual banks, BankDirect.com in Dallas, Texas, sent me a brochure touting this ability. What I later found out, however, is that they didn't yet support OFX connection capability with Quicken for Macintosh, only Quicken for Windows and Microsoft Money for Windows. More recently, BankDirect's support department has indicated it has no intention of ever supporting direct OFX connections with Quicken for Macintosh. Like CheckFree, the reason is something of a mystery. BankDirect's support department insists that EDS, its bill-fulfillment service, can't support OFX connections from a Macintosh. Representatives of EDS that I talked with, however, say that their fulfillment servers can easily support many types of OFX-capable clients, including the Macintosh.

While CheckFree has moved to a more neutral position in terms of consumer platform support, BankDirect.com's position is harder to discern. Just what does it cost to support an open protocol, OFX, from Quicken for Macintosh vs. Quicken for Windows? Since BankDirect only needs to implement the back end, and provide a minimal amount of front-end support, it shouldn't cost much.

In any case, the Macintosh is still an excellent consumer desktop, and with millions of users still out there, online banking shouldn't be this much of a hassle.

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