Yodlee doesn't depend on your FI knowing or caring in the slightest about
Money. It depends on the FI exposing a user interface that you, the human,
can use to get the information. Once that interface exists, Yodlee gets your
userid and password and literally pretends to be you. Your FI doesn't
know--unless they try to figure it out--that this is a computer at Yodlee
pretending to be you rather than you, the human. The term-of-the-art is
"screen scraping".

The issue is that Yodlee figures out how to extract what it's looking for
from various kinds of FI interfaces. Since many FIs use basically the same
interface bought from others and just add their own logos and ads, this
works great for lots of FIs with Yodlee only having to figure out a few
different UIs to crack. But if the FI "rolls their own" UI or changes the
stock one, they can pretty easily break Yodlee. And if the FI isn't not a
huge player, and the UI only comes up for Yodlee to break into once every
million users or so, they probably aren't going to worry about doing the
engineering on their side to "scrape" that FI. Not enough demand to justify
the investment.

Worse, some FIs probably actively resent Yodlee as Yodlee enables the
customer to get at the customer's data WITHOUT seeing the FIs ads.
Delivering ads to customers is the prime reason the FIs invested in the web
site in the first place. (Trust me, it wasn't because they want to make your
life easier.) Yodlee negates that investment. So, an FI that feels hard over
about this can certainly make minor tweaks to the website that totally
flummox Yodlee's ability to scrape it. I can't say for sure this is going
on, but it wouldn't surprise me for a moment.

"Robert W" <rwycoff[at][127.0.0.1]> wrote in message
news:OxmWQ94IHHA.1252[at]TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
- quote -

"tcup" <tcup[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
newsC423022-1236-4A50-ACD7-FCE9C338C9FE[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

My understanding is that the bank is the one who has to allow Money access
to your accounts. I have a retirement account that I can't get to because
it is not part of the Yodlee service that Money uses.

Why do you think there isn't "real competition" for Money? Or do you mean
Microsoft in general?

--
Michael Gordon
MVP


"tcup" <tcup[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
newsC423022-1236-4A50-ACD7-FCE9C338C9FE[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I have tried umpteen times with Microsoft Money to access my bank accounts
online and each time I'm told that MS Money is unable to do it. At this
point I am only using the Trial version of MS Money and I don't think I'll be
buying it. I resent that Microsoft wants to charge an exorbinant amount each
time I want support for their products. Too bad there isn't real competition
for Microsoft.