This has been there from the time we remember in a formal organized way but it is only now that the retail customers are getting empowered. There are two reasons for this I think a) Technology - Among others giving them some power can push them out of the branch and save real estate and manpower costs b) There is competition - particularly banks breaking country barriers to acquire reliable customers.
However for some reason retail banking customers are treated as simplistic non sophisticated users who are not trusted with features. The UI in retail Internet banking is restrictive if not condescending. Even if there are some tools it is in the mode of creating additional revenue stream or to get insight into their data and not to provide independant insight into finances. While a bank would be careful enough to prevent corruption of their data there is an opportunity for the banks to provide user fields that can be in control of the retail customers only the data store can be on the servers. This data should be maintainable and downloadable in some standard formats.
The benefits can be quite startling. A bank statement can be reviewed online and the download criteria can be defined. This is better then downloading the data and uploading this to another application to segregate.
Similar infrastructure can be provided by the banks to associate classifications (not just the comments ) at the source of a transaction that can provide classification on the nature of transactions. This can be directly fed to the tax calculation data among others.
By just providing flexibility in the way a statement can be downloaded and providing options for transaction classification a considerable customer delight can be achieved for a tech savvy customer. Options to integrate the different accounts, providing cash forecast methods are additional bonus.
Think about the amount of small scale applications that can be built by third parties by empowering these transactions.
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