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The archaic practice of using customers' online banking credentials to copy and paste their account information into other programs has been under fire. With a new API, Wells Fargo hopes to bring this practice to an end.
June 7 -
In a few instances, banks have temporarily blocked data aggregators from screen scraping customers' bank account information. Are the banks exercising appropriate judgment or obstructing potential competitors?
November 12 -
A proposal to improve the way online banking information is shared with data aggregators has sparked a debate over a decades-old practice.
November 7 -
A proposed standard for downloading bank account data could eliminate the language barrier between two competing types of Internet banking tools: aggregation, which has generated ire for its dependence on screen-scraping, and personal finance software.
December 6
When consumers use a service like Quicken or Mint, they aren't just using a single piece of software. Rather, they are using a complex set of software and services operated independently by a dozen or more companies – some supplied by banks, others supplied by nonbanks. Sometimes customers ask if there's a durable business and technical basis for these connections and software services.
Twenty years ago, that was a very important question. In the mid-to-late
Today, there are still some areas of tension between financial institutions and tech companies. However, the ground rules for making account data available to consumers for use in external software products and apps are in place and the so-called rivalry is overblown.
Over the last 20 years, the companies have established a modus vivendi that affords consumers a choice between bank-supplied software and third-party software that downloads transaction data without compromising security and privacy. Both parties understand the importance of privacy and security and use techniques such as advanced encryption and multifactor authentication to protect customer data.
Regardless of whether data is being downloaded from a bank website, via file download or using a purpose-built protocol such as the
Just like banks, technology companies do regular security reviews and audits and are also increasingly respectful of the marketing component of privacy. Quicken Inc., for example, does not use downloaded data to market to customers.
In recent months, however, one of the common ways for financial data to be received has been taking heat in the media for the perception of being particularly risky. Some customers are concerned that one of the common ways for data to be received is via website download, sometimes called
The only real drawback of website download as a data retrieval technology is that there is no explicit software contract between the website and the server using it to access data. As a result, reliability is lower than with other forms of data access. For example, a bank can change its website for a perfectly good reason – perhaps to improve the readability of a display of data. Because the screen-scraping server isn't prepared for this change, it can't interpret the transaction data; thus, the end user sees an error code.
This is one of the reasons that personal finance management software companies have been, and will continue to be, very supportive of
Financial institutions and technology companies are different and have contrasting business models. But they are both solving customer problems with modern technology and are searching for a better model.
Eric Dunn is the chief executive of Quicken Inc. Dunn joined Intuit, Quicken's previous owner, in 1986, when Quicken was the only Intuit software product; he was employee No. 4 at Intuit.