Financial Aggregation is a technology that consolidates information from different accounts, including credit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts, investments and loans, in one single place. This gives a comprehensive overview of your account balances and transactions. With just one login you can see all the transactions you made, using different credit/debit cards, balances in each of your accounts and even how your investment’s value has changed. Almost all aggregation software applications also do reports and charts to allow budgeting and easy tracking of spending habits.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are quite a few financial management solutions ava
ilable. I have been using Mint regularly but I did try some of the others (Yodlee, Wesabe and Thrive). In this post, I will give a brief outline of the online solutions I tried along with what I liked/disliked about each of them. My experience might be different from yours based on your priorities and tastes, but the important thing is to find something that will work for you.
Security concerns : Most of these tools require you to enter the username & password of all the accounts you are planning to track. Understandably this is a major security concern for most people. Read and understand the security and privacy policies of any/all the money management websites before you sign up. My only defense for using one of these sites is – you have everything in one place, so atleast if something is not right with one of the accounts that I rarely check, I will know right away instead of finding out when the statement arrives at the end of the month. It is a great risk to put all your information in one place, so if you are uncomfortable with that, you could either use one of the desktop solutions (I plan to cover these in a future post) or sites like Wesabe which give you a choice to upload your transactions (more on that below).
Mint : This is the one I currently use, so I have a lot more to say about it than any of the other tools.
Security policy: Mint Privacy
First impression: Out of the few I tried, this one has the best interface.
Ease of use: It was very easy to set everything up. As the back end is Yodlee, it provides connectivity to all the banks that are available via Yodlee. Mint uses data and aggregation software from Intuit Inc., the maker of Quicken. I didn’t have any problem bringing in all my accounts.
Likes:
- Excellent interface
- Impressive graphs and reporting
- Intuitive navigation
- Reasonably good categorization
- Cash transaction tracking available
- ‘Ways to save’ suggestions (ads)
Dislikes:
- ‘Ways to save’ suggestions (ads)
- Categorizations sometimes not perfect
- Only financial accounts can be added (no utilities or frequent flyer programs)
Other notes: Mint uses Yodlee Intuit Inc. in the background for account aggregations. It doesn’t store the passwords in its server. The ads (Mint displays them as “Ways to save”, but they are essentially ads from which they get their revenue) might or might not bother people. I liked some ads but disliked others. You cannot pay bills using Mint as it has read only access to the financial institutions. This didn’t bother me as I never pay my bills through a 3rd party payment service, but it might be a deal breaker for some. If it is, you might want to consider Yodlee.
Yodlee: This is the first one I tried. I was going to try Fidelity FullView, but on closer inspection found that they use Yodlee as the back end, so I decided to go to the source directly. Yodlee is one of the oldest and most widely used aggregation services (it has long provided account aggregation services for other companies).
Security Policy: Yodlee Security Overview
First Impression: Simple but powerful no frills money management tool.
Ease of use: It was reasonably easy to add all the accounts but the tools/features are not very intuitive or beginner friendly.
Likes:
- Powerful – you can pay bills, transfer money
- Tracks virtually all kinds of accounts, not just financial (like your gas company, phone, frequent flyer miles, credit card reward points)
Dislikes:
- Not very user friendly or intuitive
- Less choices for reporting/charting
- The recently updated interface is buggy
Other notes: Yodlee provides account aggregation services to a lot of financial institutions ( Yodlee’s Customers ) so if you are using/have used Fidelity’s Fullview or Bank of America’s MyPortfolio you are already using Yodlee. It does store all the usernames and passwords you provide.
Thrive
Security Policy: Thrive’s Privacy policy
First Impression: I was really looking forward to trying Thrive. I have read their privacy policy and taken the tour of the features. It has a lot of things that sound nice and unique. Financial health score, saving goals, progress tracking,
a budget tool that looks promising and a debt pay off wizard. All of them looked neat and I wanted to try them out… only problem was it didn’t let me. I created a login and tried adding my first account. It kept kicking me out and asked me to login again and again and again. If anyone knows what I am doing wrong, please tell me. I would love to try Thrive.
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