Enough slagging off banks, let’s talk about some of the good things some of the NZ banks have been doing lately …

I see Kiwibank have launched an iPhone version of their online banking site.

Very cool.

I love it how they have stripped back the functionality to just the essential bits – check your balance, transfer money.  The only thing that’s possibly missing is making a payment.  As a result the interface is not cluttered with lots of unnecessary noise.

However, look closely at the screenshots and you’ll see an interface still dominated by lots of mostly meaningless numbers.

Is “38-9007-0581259-00″ your cheque account or your savings account?  Or your company account?  Or maybe your joint account for shared expenses?  You’ll have to either have a memory for long strings or (more likely) guess based on the balances.  But, good luck with that approach on the transfer screen – there are no balances displayed.

As far as innovations go I’m much more impressed with a small change that ASB recently made: you can now name your own accounts.

So simple.

You can choose names, like “Cheque” or “Savings”.  But, if you like, you can also call them whatever you want.  Use this to your advantage – I imagine it would be much harder to frivolously spend money from your savings account if it was called “Fiji Trip”, for example!

Little things…