National Australia Bank has added a feature called Money Tracker to its internet banking site; it is a free budgeting tool that allows customers to watch where, when and how they are spending their money.NAB's executive general manager for direct banking, Sam Plowman, said that the tool could "grab all NAB transaction data from accounts and credit cards", and then classify spending by expenditure type, to draw a pie chart showing how much a customer spent on his or her mortgage, on groceries, on medical expenses, fuel etc.Users can add information so the system learns that transactions with, say, a business called Chilli Bites, for example, would be displayed in the "takeaway" portion of the chart.NAB is also offering tools to allow people to develop their own budget and savings plans. At present, Money Tracker is only available on the NAB website, but Plowman said the bank plans to build a mobile version in the future.From a technical point of view, Money Tracker relies on NAB's NextGen overhaul of its computer system, which allows a single view of customer information. In this respect, it's similar to Commonwealth Bank's MyWealth, which was launched last week, which relies on its new core banking platform.Like CBA, NAB is hoping its tool will bring in new business and encourage existing customers to add more financial services, in order to generate a more comprehensive financial picture using the online tools.Data-intensive tools are, on the face of it, a giveaway to customers, but they give banks a much finer-grained understanding of customers' financial behaviour, allowing them to develop new products or cross-sell services based on analysis of real-time customer behaviour. Plowman said that while NAB would not re-sell the insights it gleaned from Money Tracker it would be able to compare individuals' spending patterns with their demographic, and make recommendations about financial products and services - in much the same way as Amazon might recommend a book to a user based on what similar customers had bought in the past.