Some folks were talking during a break in one of my courses about banks and the newfangled authentication systems they're using, such as two-factor authentication. This turned into a discussion of phishing, and it occurred to me that RSS feeds would solve that problem very nicely.
Right now, banks (and PayPal and eBay, etc) email notifications when they want to tell their customers something. The problem is, you have no way of knowing whether the email is actually coming from your bank. If banks set up a personalized RSS feed for their customers, customers who subscribe to their personal feed have the comfort of knowing that they're getting the info right from the source. Security wouldn't be a huge issue. Grabbing an RSS feed is just like grabbing a web page: you can password-protect them and encrypt the connection. Because RSS is built on top of mature web protocols, most of the security problems have already been solved.
Most people don't use RSS, and that's okay. You wouldn't need to replace the email notifications. Just make the RSS system available for people who want to use it. By introducing customers to RSS and demonstrating how they can use it to protect themselves, banks would spur adoption of RSS, which would provide incentive for people to come up with more creative uses, etc.
Fortunately, I'm not the first person to notice this. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any of the big players are moving in this direction, even though it's a rather simple idea to implement.