[uf-new] Bank Account numbers

[Guillaume Lebleu]

Thom,

I am very interested in looking into the value of such an idea.

I have been researching the representation of bank account numbers in 
XML for a standard organization in a recent past, have learnt about the 
limitations of such an XML representation, and have been playing with 
POSH representations of bank account numbers/identifiers. I would be 
very happy to contribute my thoughts.

That said, I think we need to start with the "What are we trying to 
accomplish" and "is a microformat relevant or only POSH".

Re: "What are we trying to accomplish" question: what application could 
benefit from such a microformat? The one I can think of is 
REST/(X)HTML-based financial messaging, for instance, sending a payment 
message that would be both human and machine readable, and 
URL-addressable. That seems quite a departure from the current highly 
structured data structures and messaging practices of the financial 
industry, so simply coming up with a new way of doing old things would 
probably not be enough to drive adoption. We need a "killer app", even 
if it is something that the bank account number is simply a building 
block of. I would be curious to hear your ideas of killer applications 
that such a bank account number microformat would specifically enable.

Re: "is a microformat relevant or only POSH" my thoughts on that is that 
account numbers are usually not published on the public Web, and less 
and less are even published on private Web spaces i.e. your Web banking 
application or Paypal app (obfuscating identifiers such as XXXX-98989 
are increasingly preferred). My understanding is that the microformat 
community is more geared towards data on the public Web. I may have 
simply misunderstood, but this aspect of bank account number may be a 
non-starter for a microformat (which does not mean we can't take the 
discussion elsewhere). Perhaps, more knowledgeable community members 
could enlighten us on this particular question.

Thanks in advance,

Guillaume