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Account aggregation is the latest rage in online financial services. At a single Web site, you can view a summary of any online account. I've taken my first test drive with an account aggregator, Yodlee (www.yodlee.com), which powers AOL's MyAccount service and similar services at Citibank (www.myciti.com) and E-Trade (www.etrade.com). My conclusion: It's a blockbuster technology that's going to become standard at banks, online brokers, and major portals, but at the moment, it creates account aggravation better than it aggregates accounts. When account aggregation works correctly, it cuts down on Web-surfing time and the tedium of logging onto multiple password-protected sites. But the "screen-scraping" technology deployed by Yodlee can't always provide the information I want. Exhibit A: For several months, Yodlee could not access my accounts at Fleet Bank, New England's largest bank. I can now access my accounts, but sometimes I get error messages indicating the data supplied is old. Exhibit B: I can't access my Bank of America credit-card account. Yodlee customer service says it's working to resolve the problem. Exhibit C: Yodlee doesn't provide balances of individual holdings in my brokerage account. Instead, it provides only share, share price (prior day's close), and total balance information. The mobile-phone version of Yodlee is surprisingly fast. But without access to key information such as the value of my individual holdings, its value was dubious. Yodlee has problems organizing account data in a meaningful way. Personal finances are summarized in three categories: banking, credit cards, and investments. The lack of data on individual investment holdings is one flaw. There's a similar problem with my bank account data. At Fleet, I have a checking account, a savings account, and a brokerage account. Yodlee identifies my brokerage account balance as a "banking" balance, and lists my investment balance along with my checking and savings account balance. The smart programmers who developed screen scraping can surely resolve these problems. And when they do, account aggregation will start to take off. It has the potential to greatly simplify the process of keeping track of one's financial life. Still, it's one thing to retrieve balance information from different sites. It's another to be able to use the data in a meaningful way. BETTER TOOLS. The technology is moving quickly. A Boston-area startup called ByAllAccounts.com (www.byallaccounts.com) is combining account aggregation with analytical tools for investors. Yodlee, which clearly understands where it needs to go, has signed a partnership with FinanCenter.com (www.financenter.com), which supplies online personal financial planning tools for such things as calculating how much it will take to pay off a credit-card balance or project future savings balances. There are nine account aggregation companies in all, according to the Online Banking Report (www.onlinebankingreport.com). And each is working on new ways to extend the technology, such as e-mail alerts, loan payment integration, and financial planning features. Intuit, which has a lot at stake as the technology develops into potential competition, recently launched a new version of Quicken -- Quicken 2001 -- that incorporates account aggregation. I'll check this out in a later column. Have an opinion about account aggregation? Let me know at the e-mail address below. Smith covers a wide variety of topics, including personal finance issues, from Business Week's Boston bureau. Have a question or a comment? Let him know at geoff_smith@ebiz.businessweek.com. |
