I thought I had read in one of those that PG really wants to replace banks and credit cards. Or maybe it was someone else. Either way, that's one of the things I'd love to get into as far as "big picture" stuff (along with a cloud-based "space station" on venus, but the bank thing might be slightly less difficult). I'd completely revamp the entire purchase process, as much as legally possible (and realistically doing that would also require lobbying to change any outdated laws we can that aren't being protected by the other banks. You'd have to go after all the peripheral laws first I feel like, or else the banks would crush you with their influence). The entire transfer of funds and the documentation of the purchase would be re-done based on what we can actually do with this kind of data. It's insane that my bank only tells me things like "AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS AMZN.COM/BILL WA 06/26" for an amazon purchase. Mint tries to parse that and just has no idea how to classify it. The truth is, the bank should only get sufficient information for facilitating the transfer, and there needs to be a simple system of reporting detailed purchase info directly from the store to the user. Getting this to work with many vendors would be a pain, but it doesn't help that currently I don't know anything about those systems. I have some ideas on how to kind of abstract that out...
Just responding to the specific example, I've been very happy with square / square wallet in this regard. The system recognizes my card, and offers to send me an itemized receipt via email for any transaction. I can use this to clearly see the merchant, date/time, and what I paid for. Simple (the bank) is making inroads in this as well, and even PayPal's receipt emails are more descriptive. Maybe a bit too complex of an issue for a startup to hit now (look at what happened to Dwolla) but certainly still a lot of "pain points" to solve left.
Maybe Mint should scrape Amazon and other retailers in addition to bank websites? Would you trust Mint to keep your Amazon password in addition to your bank's? (Maybe Mint should pivot slightly to include password database management? :p )
Right now, our system is pretty much how you describe it, where the financial institution only gets the basic information of who and how much. And if you want more detail, the retailer provides it.
So I guess you're looking for a service that centralizes that info into the same place as your other financial details?
What if retailers/banks gave you a separate account login that can only be used to read data? There wouldn't be nearly as much risk in giving this out to third parties.
You know, Google reads all your email and uses it in combination with your search history to populate Google Now cards. When you buy something online, you typically get a detailed email receipt. I bet if anyone knows exactly what you buy, it would be Google. That is, if you are using Gmail.
