There is a post at The Bankwatch about a product that will alert a bank customer of transaction activity with their bank card. Earlier this week a product called My-Spy was on a local TV newscast with a similar service. It will be interesting to see how these products develop.
The credit union I work for developed a product over 2 years ago called MemberNote. It does the same thing but with a completely different method. It was built around the banking system and is totally an in-house solution. There are some differences.
These commercial products will have a price in order to implement them. That price will probably be passed on to the consumer. We have seen this as a necessary service and have implemented it from day one with no cost to the user. It is free. You will only pay what your telcom charges you for text messaging. That brings up a point. Is there any agreements between these companies and say Telus about revenue sharing on the messaging side?
The 3rd party solution is going to bang the @#$% out of anyones internet banking servers unless they can install the software/solution at the host site and deliver the alerts. What happens to website stats when the ‘bots’ are running let’s say every 5 minutes, signing into a banking internet page, pulling the info, and sending the alert (if there is a transaction)? There will be a lot of hits just to find out there wasn’t a transaction to report.
Security. Sorry but I really don’t want my PC running all day with a program to monitor my bank account in order to give me alerts.
These may be moot points. Competition is always great as it pushes us all to create something better. We plan on releasing a version 2 of the product in the next few months. New features will give another dimension to this service. We think it will be that much better.
Tinfoiling 
Looking forward to seeing what v. 2.0 looks like Gene. You’ve done this the right way — keeping it free of the middle men, providing a high-value user pays system (should they have charges for receiving messages). Would love to see this licenced and rolled out to other CUs in Canada.
Scott Baldwin, NSCU