Why does BofA connection says "You can only use direct connect if you used it in the past"

dadunmire

What? Is this really mean what I think it means? I called the bank yesterday and after an hour they disconnected when I got to tech support.
Is see the comments about limiting quicken users , and direct connect. They are playing dumb with me.

Boatnmaniac

I do not use BofA but per this post thread BofA discontinued offering support for DC for new accounts a couple of years ago.  Apparently they grandfathered in DC support for accounts that already had it at that time:  https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/19528489#Comment_19528489.

Boatnmaniac

I do not use BofA but per this post thread BofA discontinued offering support for DC for new accounts a couple of years ago.  Apparently they grandfathered in DC support for accounts that already had it at that time:  https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/19528489#Comment_19528489.

Rocket J Squirrel

I recently spoke with a B of A person who actually understood Quicken. The story is that the ability to use Direct Connect is tied to the user ID used to connect with B of A. It's per-user, not per-account. So if you have a B of A login which allowed DC in the past, use that ID. It was not stated explicitly, but my inference is that if you change your B of A user ID (which is all too easy to do), you will not be able to reconnect DC to that ID.

dadunmire

OK Did some checking across institutions... The bottom line is that BofA has discontinued support for direct connect as has many major banks and the answer is multifaceted but two top reasons I would have advised as an economist - "recover investment in their own spending on Online Banking since they are charging fees" and fair. As a security analyst - "easy back door for the Electronic Fraud Cowboy", and the finally, the Covid epidemic causing several tipping points both in social, shopping and corporate spending profiles. Because the real bottom line is how many companies will want to continue to pay for expensive office towers when they just learned how to make most of those employees pay for their own office?

Just like the tipping point for electric vehicles in 2020.

But, by no means an endorsement of crypto blockchained currrency.

dadunmire

Correct, typo most Banks are NOT charging for consumer online banking.

Chris_QPW

This is really nothing new, it has been going on for many years now.  At one point about 4500 financial institutions supported Direct Connect, and now it is down to about 2000.  That is out of more then 30,000 financial institutions in the US alone.   The credit unions tended to be the first to drop support.
What most people using Quicken tend to forget is that the Quicken users are a drop in the bucket for most financial institutions.  And this isn't 1980 when the financial institutions didn't have much of their own offerings in this area.

They tried to get Quicken users to pay for this service, but you can see the result of that even to this day.  The moment that is suggested, everyone suggests finding a financial institution that doesn't charge.  We are running out of those financial institutions quickly.

And unlike the EU that forced the financial institutions to support one or both of two standardized protocols (one of which is the OFX protocol) the US/Canadian government won't do that, so you have "Express Web Connect" which is an "ad hock" agreement between Intuit and the financial institution on how to get logged into their website and download the data.  The same goes for other "aggregators".