Who's swallowing all the pie-charts?

If at the end of each month you wonder where all your money has gone, there's an online banking service about to be launched which could tell you exactly where you've spent your cash.

First Direct is about to pilot a new feature for its internet banking customers which will produce instant graphs and pie-charts of where they've blown all their money.

This "spending analysis" service takes the information from a customer's monthly statement and turns it into charts which represent spending patterns, so that at a glance you might be able to compare how much you've spent on shopping sprees or on paying utility bills.

This lifestyle budgeting tool, which will be free to online customers, can also show how spending patterns have changed compared to previous months, giving a more accurate picture of how much really was spent on those hazily remembered holiday months or during the Christmas party season.

It's a bit like Peter Snow taking his electronic election swingometer and flying graphics to your home finances.

The bank sees this as a step towards a new generation of customer-friendly online banking services, giving customers an eye-catching and visually appealing way of getting a clearer picture of their finances.

At a glance, customers will be able to see how much of their spending pie-chart is swallowed up by the mortgage, credit card payments, phone bills or cash machine withdrawals. And the bank says that this might act as a spur for customers to take a firmer grip on their finances and see where they can make savings.

If you think that your spending patterns are no more reckless than anyone else's, you can use the spending analysis service to see how close you are to the "typical" expenditure of someone of a similar age living in the same postcode.

Among the average spending patterns identified by the bank, we take out £2,300 from cash machines each year, put £3,000 through credit cards and donate £157 to charity. And a third of all monthly current account statements show spending on DIY and home improvement.

This First Direct service is going to be offered to about 75,000 of the bank's internet customers on a trial basis, with plans to roll it out later to all of its 570,000 online customers.

Apart from being a practical way of looking at the bigger picture of how we spend our money, it's also a step towards a much more visually appetising way of looking at money.

"People are busy and they expect information to be at their fingertips and this is a way of letting people see an instant picture of their financial lives. We already have the information about all their transactions, so it's a case of giving it back to customers in a way that's useful to them," says First Direct spokesperson Alison McMinn.

People aren't interested in money for its own sake, she says. They want to know how their money is working as part of the bigger picture of their lives, as holiday money, clearing bills or buying a home. And the spending analysis service is a way of presenting an account in terms of a customer's life, where they shop and their own priorities, rather than in the impersonal, ledger-book style of traditional banking.

It's yet another shift towards the idea that personal finance is more and more about lifestyle and that it should be presented with the same retail sensibilities that we'd expect from any other service.

If you were buying a pair of shoes, it wouldn't be a case of looking at the cheapest and sturdiest and checking the small print for how they were manufactured, it would be about the look, feel, comfort and brand associations. And the same is increasingly becoming the case for financial services. Fashion has a role as well as functionality.

When Abbey relaunched, it sent out a catalogue of products to customers which looked more like it had come from Habitat than a bank. Supermarkets such as Tesco have brought a retail edge to financial services with instant insurance that you can buy at the check-out.

Egg spokesperson Mark Maguire says that banks are having to re-think themselves as consumer brands and to be aware of the "customer experience" of using their services.

"Money is an everyday object - it's not just reserved for a group of hobbyists. And the interfaces with customers have to reflect that. In the past, financial services have failed miserably in talking to customers in a way that brings money to life."

And he points to the way that a once dull financial topic such as property has already experienced the same image make-over.

"If you'd have said that 15 years ago there would be dozens of television programmes about maximising the value of your property, people would have laughed."