Encouraged by a proposal recently made in the Wall Street Journal by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein called Disclosure Is The Best Kind of Credit Regulation, we at FeeFighters took a few nights and developed a demo version of the kind of system proposed.

Basically the proposal is that, instead of all the silly fine-print and hidden fees, financial services companies would be required to provide an electronic file to their customers showing them exactly what kinds of fees and rates they could be charged in each situation (example – what happens to my rate if I pay late) and exactly what fees and rates they paid over the past year.

Instead of reading the electronic file itself, consumers would upload it to web-based services that would parse the file and provide analysis.  Such web-based services would likely be anonymous and free. Since the data format would be published widely, anyone with the technical know-how could create such a web-based service.  Here is a screencast of what such a system might look like ( A larger version of the screencast is available here ).

The example is for a consumer credit card, but this kind of system could work for almost any financial product, including checking accounts, insurance, credit card processing, mortgages, etc.