Updating with Pentagon Federal Credit Union

madgijoe

Is anyone else having a problem updating with PFCU? I haven't been able to update since 26 August 21. PFCU and Quicken both deny anything is wrong!

Unknown

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Larry Hathaway

I'm having same problem. My last successful download was Aug 25 and each time I received an error message I sent the report to Quicken. On Sep 11 I queried a Quicken representative on the Chat and told him my problem. He advised me that they are working with PFCU to correct the problem. I asked him if they had an anticipated fix date but he never answered. I then asked him if anyone bothered to read error reports and if there was any compensation since I was not receiving a service for which I was paying. He gave me a loud shout out of NO and no further explanations. I think he was becoming annoyed with me. I fired off a letter of Quicken Corporate explaining my problem and the unacceptable responses I was getting. Do I expect a response, to be honest no.

jacobs

Larry Hathaway said:

I asked him if they had an anticipated fix date but he never answered.

They rarely can tell you when a problem is expected to be fixed, because it involved multiple third parties: Intuit, who provides connectivity services for Quicken, and the financial institution. Each case is different; some require changes by the financial institution, some require changes by Intuit, and some require changes by both. The Quicken support people don't have any insight into what the issue is, where it currently stands, or an expected ETA.

It would be great if they had enhanced reporting on the nature of each outage, but that would require either Quicken or Intuit to add systems and staff to translate their technical tracking into customer-friendly language to report on issues.

Larry Hathaway said:

I then asked him if ... there was any compensation since I was not receiving a service for which I was paying. He gave me a loud shout out of NO and no further explanations.

Quicken never gives refunds for connectivity outages. As already noted, in many cases it's due to the financial institution. The credit union may have changed the website, login procedures, security protocols or made other changes which causes Quicken's attempts to log in and/or download information to fail. Or they block access to they server to lighten their server loads, or to perform maintenance which can last a few hours, days or weeks. Quicken can't give refunds every time a financial institution makes a change -- or if they did, they'd have to charge significantly more for Quicken software and services to basically self-insure for all the outage payments they would need to make.

Also, just think about the logistics and impracticality of tracking and issuing refunds. Quicken deals with some 14,000 financial institutions, and some number of them have technical problems every week, so they'd be paying out for multiple outages each week. But let's look at it from the customer's side. Let's say the average customer has four financial institutions, and let's say they say that 50% of each year's subscription cost is for connectivity services. So if one of your financial institutions is out of operation for a month, that would  1/4 (one out of four connected institutions) of 1/2 of the subscription fee; for a $50 subscription, that would amount to about $6.25 per year, or about 1.7¢ per day. And they'd need to add staff to handle processing and questions/complaints about such refunds, which would drive up the annual cost.

Bottom line: Quicken doesn't do partial refunds because a financial institution has made a change that knocks them offline for a while, and there's really no practical way they could do so.

Yes, it's annoying as hell if your financial institution is unavailable in Quicken for days or weeks. But without the financial industry adopting some universal standard to make information freely available, it's just a fact of life that there are going to be outages like this from time to time.

gcbrian

I have been unable to download balance information from Pen Fed Credit Union since August 25 (thru Quicken). No problem accessing data on a direct basis. I would welcome any suggestions as to the way forward.

Smart_VAH

I have the same problem with PenFed accounts update/download since mid-Aug 2021. Have a support ticket for 'escalated' resolution since 2 Sep but no update about this. Apparently PFCU and Quicken stopped playing nice with each other, and the Q-subscribers are facing the consequences.

Larry Hathaway

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gcbrian

My Pen Fed accounts finally updated today which is the first time since August 25. Seems that all of our concerns and escalations resulted in this problem getting resolved.

dudetteski101

We are new to PenFed. Unable to add the mortgage. Representative at PenFed said they no longer work with Quicken because there was fraud the beginning of year where Quicken was trying to acquire member information without the members knowledge. This is a serious accusation! Of course I called Quicken and asked if there was a breach with Quicken in the last year. Rep said he hasn't heard such a thing and it may be the banks excuse for one reason or another. I researched online and this is the only thing I could find:

https://www.doj.nh.gov/consumer/security-breaches/documents/quicken-loans-20200720.pdf#:~:text=After%20discovering%20the%20incident%2C%20Quicken%20Loans%20worked%20to,identity%20theft%20as%20a%20result%20of%20the%20incident.

I would appreciate any information anyone may have regarding this matter.

garysmith87

First off, you're being told a lie by PenFed. Quicken Loans is NOT Pentagon Federal Credit Union.  And there was no such Quicken data breach with PenFed (or any other lender, for that matter).

PenFed is nothing but problems, even for their checking or savings accounts.  They love to post new banners on their website...but don't bother to inform Quicken they are doing so and thus break Intuit's "screen scraper" aggregation process by not having the correct info in the designated places they told Quicken they would be in.  

Second, there is no need to download transactions for a mortgage account in Quicken.  Set up the mortgage loan as a manual account in Quicken using Quicken's "Loan Wizard".  Set up a Scheduled Transaction from within that wizard and you'll have more flexibility within the account and more accurate reports.  

Luckily, we refinanced our mortgage early this year and had our mortgage transferred from PenFed to another lender.  And with that, we were able to close our mandatory checking account that was needed to associate with the mortgage loan.

Although the staff at PenFed are professional and courteous, their website is a disaster (very difficult to navigate) and I had constant download connectivity issues with them almost monthly with that checking account.  

jacobs

@dudetteski101  The link you posted is about Quicken Loans. Quicken Loans has absolutely nothing to do with Quicken except that they licensed the same 7-letter name from Intuit.

As for the claim that Quicken was trying to obtain information about PenFed montage holders without their knowledge, I can only say I've never heard of this. It doesn't sound particularly plausible, since that's not the way Quicken works at all: Quicken users have to enter their account information into Quicken to track any account. Are they suggesting that Quicken was using one person's login to PenFed to try to steal PenFed's customer data? You're right, that would be a very serious accusation -- but it just doesn't sound right. If there was any truth to this, hundreds or thousands of financial institutions would be terminating their agreements to work with Quicken. We've seen no such mass desertions of financial institutions working with Quicken, so I suspect this PenFed representative was relaying incorrect information. Especially since another user posted just above your post that PenFed was working for them again in Quicken.