Big Banks Lock Horns with Personal-Finance Web Portals

Re:Big Banks Lock Horns with Personal-Finance Web Portals by ChuckMcM on Thursday November 05, 2015 @10:58AM (#10514018)

In the US they also have a fiduciary requirement to protect your money to the best of their ability. I appreciate that some of the larger banks might actually consider the impact of a data breach at an aggregator but reading this a couple of times it really sounds like a whine that they feel they have to provision more capacity for both their user base + the load put on by the aggregators their user base is using. They don't have a way to charge the aggregator for their use like they do the customer.

If the latter is the real reason they are whining then I expect they will push for a fee than can charge people who access their account through an aggregator much like they charge people who access their account through Quickbooks.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Big Banks Lock Horns with Personal-Finance Web Portals by toomuchtodo on Thursday November 05, 2015 @11:00AM (#10514042)

I'd just change banks though. Its trivial when you only have a few bills that need ACH/EDI, and the rest of your payments are on auto-pay on a credit card (which you pay from your checking account). BankSimple (now Simple) let me down so many times during their tech upgrade, I simply moved over to Fidelity for my checking account needs. It took ~15 minutes to change my direct deposit online with my employer, and re-create my bill pay setup.

As a bank, you are a commodity. You simply store the bits that say how many resources I can consume over a moving window of time.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Big Banks Lock Horns with Personal-Finance Web Portals by KirinDave on Thursday November 05, 2015 @01:11PM (#10515041)

> I appreciate that some of the larger banks might actually consider the impact of a data breach at an aggregator but reading this a couple of times it really sounds like a whine that they feel they have to provision more capacity for both their user base + the load put on by the aggregators their user base is using. They don't have a way to charge the aggregator for their use like they do the customer.

They absolutely charge their aggregators. Most of the aggregators can't screenscrape without permission of the aggregators. Why on earth would you think they can't? Why do you think Mint doesn't need to do MFA for so many banks and can just get away with a user-pass challenge?

This is about holding control of their customer base, plain and simple. They know everyone else, even other banks, are eager to dis-intermediate their customer base. They're spending too much money maintaining branches and offering inferior savings products to compete digitally, so they would rather delay that as long as possible.

[ Parent | on HN ]