HISA tool improvement - automatic updates

One of the most common concerns with any rate comparison tool is simple: "Are these rates actually current?"

Fair question. And honestly, it's the one I'd ask too.

That's why I've just shipped automatic updates for the OzFinn HISA comparison tool.

How it works

All bank savings account pages are now checked automatically once a month to pick up any changes. But here's the part I'm most pleased about - after an RBA rate change, the checking frequency jumps to weekly for the following month. Rate changes tend to cascade through the banks over a few weeks, so this is exactly when you need the most up-to-date info.

The result: you can be reasonably confident the rates you see on OzFinn are current at almost any point in time.

Under the hood

In the spirit of transparency, I want to share how this works. The automatic checks use Anthropic's Claude API to read and interpret the data on each bank's savings account page. So far, it's worked flawlessly across every bank page I've tested. It's genuinely impressive at pulling structured rate data from pages that are all formatted differently. Some interesting data points for the curious ones - it cost about $13 to get the structured data from all bank pages (~50) that we are tracking. However, after stripping some unnecessary data and making some data optimizations before passing it to the AI, I managed to strip down the cost to about $1 per check. And, this is a price, I'd be happily paying for the sake of having up to date details automatically.

A small but important caveat

As much as I trust the system, I'd still encourage you to double-check the options that work best for your situation before making any decisions. Banks can change terms and conditions in ways that go beyond headline rates, and no automated tool can catch every nuance. OzFinn is here to narrow down your options quickly - the final check should always be yours.

That's it. A small improvement, but one that should make the tool meaningfully more useful. As always, if you spot anything that looks off, let me know.