Ideas

This is something that needs to be taken up with each individual banking relationship. The liability alone of following someone elses interpretation of what the contract language is staggering. I understand what you are trying to get at...I just think this is too big for you to wrap a handle around.

I've refined the idea a little to clarify it for those who have little experience of microformats.
It's a technical solution that would not generate any sort of revenue, but the adoption of such a standard would speed up the development of web and desktop based financial software and services - in much the same way as RSS has revolutionised publishing.

If you have some technical know-how I recommend a look at http://microformats.org

Nice one

Who are you really targeting here? You mention the customer of financial institutions but in reality, existing customers are likely to get information they need directly from the provider websites already (and most likely a lot have .csv downloads for loading into desktop financial management applications).

If you're trying to make it easier for people to compare products, bear in mind that most financial institutions do not want to make it easier for you to compare apples with apples. You'll see subtle differences in the way they structure their fees, commission, investment return calculations etc. that would make it difficult to aggregate and compare in a meaningful way. So automating this isn't as easy as it sounds which is why it generally is limited to having to visit those product comparison sites you mention that have done the hard work of mashing all the information from each provider.

If just having access to product names, classifications, investment allocations etc from multiple providers is what you're after, there are generally already 3rd parties that disseminate this information in electronic formats. For example, in Australia we have a bunch of companies that have gone the hard yards and worked to get product data feeds from the major institutions and then offer this centrally to those who wish to subscribe. An example would be morningstar.com.au.

We also have providers of financial planning applications who've done the same. Investmentlink.com.au is one of the oldest data aggregators and has been around for over 15 years. They are the backbone data provider to a lot of the financial management applications available here.

It's not an attractive market for new software providers to enter as the encumbants have a huge strangehold and to be honest most investors care more about the performance of their investment that whether they can get an electronic feed into a piece of software. The big investor with a lot of sway would generally have a financial adviser to do this for them anyway.

Granted some of the data can have quality issues but trying to out-gun them would take such a massive coordination effort and you'd face an uphill battle convincing the institutions that they should care about supporting yet another data distribution mechanism.

Sorry - after re-reading my comments above I realise this sounds like a total diss if your idea. Please don't take my comments in that way. If you can find a way to make the financial institutions collaborate - THAT is the killer solution.

an "updated" accounting tool software? Copy right it!..you are tyring to smirk on the giants out there if you can out muscle them in marketing i guess you have a china man chance (no offense)..but if you have a platform to carry this first in guerilla type propagation..you will have the world waiting on your Alpha version!

siddey, thanks for your comments - I took the whole thing constructively :)

I can see that getting the financial institutions to buy in would be the hardest part, I think the focus would need to be on cutting the cost of syndicating data to resellers in order to tempt them.

Possibly the only way to get serious adoption of the standard is to create a killer app that can integrate the format or persuade one of the large existing financial apps to do so.

I'm pretty set on drafting something out to be picked over by the standardistas as microformats.org so We'll see where it goes.

Keep in mind that once an institution has created one or more data exports, the formats very rarely change as the fundamentals of what constitutes financial product information doesn't often change for any one product type. Therefore, once they've invested in the initial build, they leave it well alone and hope like mad that some legislative change doesn't mean they need to spend more money changing the data file export process.

Therefore costing cutting probably shouldn't be your goal as it is a one-off exercise for both sides of the equation. I would recommend trying to delve into some niche sectors of the financial services sector and see if there are products not currently being supported by the data hubs that you could focus on.

Perhaps also look at some of the boutique investment firms who may not have a dedicated IT department and therefore are the ones who are more cost conscious. If you can help them increase their exposure on the financial management software platforms, that could be good. You could become a mini-provider yourself.

That's another interesting way to look at it, I've been concentrating on the technical challenge of creating the format. Once the spec is done there could be a business opportunity to manage the syndication of the data to affiliates.
Having a dedicated IT department does not rule out using external services - I've worked in highly skilled IT departments and entirely IT companies and we regularly use external service providers because it's generally more cost effective for specific jobs or services

Have you looked at Wesabe's API? Maybe these guys can help you as well

I am finding that credit companies and banks are pushing the "Quicken" format (or similar). Some will not provide csv format. They should be required by law to provide "spreadsheet" format of spreadsheet data. They usually do provide pdf, and the columns do not parse correctly in the spreadsheet ($1,000.00 > $1 000.00). For the consumer, I suggest you see if there are existing tools to parse financial data from pdf files as a starting point.