Alleviating privacy and security concerns in financial aggregation programs

This paper focuses on the privacy and security concerns of young people in Australia regarding the use of financial aggregation (FA) programs as a way of making decisions about their money. The use of FA programs to provide a comprehensive online picture of a person¿s finances, bringing together information from discreet providers, is one example of the increasing importance of Internet and media services in the lives of young people. Young people are likely to be the target user group for these programs; this is because younger Australians are known to use Internet banking to a greater extent than older Australians. They also see it as more private, more secure and more trustworthy than do older Australians. Drawing particularly on two user experience workshops in Melbourne around Sunario, a FA prototype, the paper documents the privacy and security concerns of the 24 participants, all of whom were between 18 and 45 years old. Despite these concerns and other usability issues, the majority of the participants said they would use the prototype. The paper describes how the design of the FA program had some of these concerns in mind when it decided against automatically downloading information from accounts held by another bank. Following the workshop, there were further attempts to alleviate the users¿ privacy and security concerns while increasing the trustworthiness of the service. The paper illustrates the value of user feedback to the design of a FA program. The design principles that emerged from the workshops have general applicability to all FA programs. The paper also recommends the need for regulatory overview to ensure that the provision of these new financial services continues to be a safe and private space for information and transaction.