Quicken-Schwab connectivity changes: apology from Quicken CEO

snowmp

Like many in the Quicken community, I received an apology this morning via email from Quicken's CEO for the recent train wreck that was the "upgrade" in connectivity between Schwab and Quicken.

This apology appeared sincere and was very welcome: the "upgrade" cost me around 20 hours of time and aggravation reading forums, installing patches, deactivating and reactivating accounts, talking to Quicken customer service, emailing my broker at Schwab, chatting with Schwab customer service... and then painstakingly removing thousands of duplicate transactions going back to July of last year. After over a decade of being a loyal customer of both Schwab and Quicken, I have never come so close to abandoning both.

The apology from Quicken's CEO contained the following terrifying sentence: "There will be more upgrades in the coming year as we work with our Financial Institution partners to modernize, improve, and help ensure the security of our data connections."

The purpose of this post is to advocate that you just don't! Take an oath to first, do no harm. If it's not broken, don't fix it. The only choice we as customers were given recently was to suffer through, or purchase and learn entirely new financial management tools. That's no way to treat paying customers.

Quicken community, if you too would like the ability to opt out of future "upgrades" and avoid a next time, please endorse/upvote this idea.

NotACPA

You also had the choice to leave Schwab (who initiated/demanded this change) and change to another firm such as Vanguard or Fidelity or many others.

I.E., you could have "voted with your feet".

mitch.trumpetwin

@NotACPA Fidelity will be doing this soon....   https://www.fidelity.com/security/fidelity-access-data-security

Sherlock

mitch.trumpetwin said:

@NotACPA Fidelity will be doing this soon....   https://www.fidelity.com/security/fidelity-access-data-security

Soon?  

Ps56k2

bummer - I didn't get an email...

Chris_QPW

@snowmp I think what you really don't get is this isn't a Quicken Inc choice, and it isn't your choice either.
Did either Quicken Inc or Charles Schwab ask your permission for this?

There is no way that Quicken Inc can dictate to the financial institution on this.
Charles Schwab didn't ask Quicken Inc (or even Intuit) for permission, they decided, and then worked with the "aggregators" on a timeline.  That is about the most you can expect the financial institution working with the other parties to try to do it smoothly (even though they failed at that).

Quicken Inc might put up a front on how nice this is and such, and maybe some of them even believe it, but they aren't in the driver's seat, the financial institutions are.

Quicken Inc might even believe that this working towards sorry needed standard that all the financial institutions would use, but history has told us that what will happen is just a small percentage of the financial institutions will go with this means that the connect methods that have to be supported will increase not decrease.

10s_player

> @Chris_QPW said:
> @snowmp I think what you really don't get is this isn't a Quicken Inc choice, and it isn't your choice either.
> Did either Quicken Inc or Charles Schwab ask your permission for this?
>
> There is no way that Quicken Inc can dictate to the financial institution on this.
> Charles Schwab didn't ask Quicken Inc (or even Intuit) for permission, they decided, and then worked with the "aggregators" on a timeline.  That is about the most you can expect the financial institution working with the other parties to try to do it smoothly (even though they failed at that).
>
> Quicken Inc might put up a front on how nice this is and such, and maybe some of them even believe it, but they aren't in the driver's seat, the financial institutions are.
>
> Quicken Inc might even believe that this working towards sorry needed standard that all the financial institutions would use, but history has told us that what will happen is just a small percentage of the financial institutions will go with this means that the connect methods that have to be supported will increase not decrease.

There are quite a few financial institutions and fintech products that are onboard with a new API data sharing standard through FDX. https://financialdataexchange.org/FDX/The%20Consortium/FDX/The-Consortium/Members.aspx?hkey=362ecd23-b752-48aa-b104-a99e916276c8

NotACPA

@mitch.trumpetwin Read a bit further into that link that you provided:

"How do third-party financial websites and applications obtain Fidelity account data today,

without Fidelity AccessSM?

Fidelity Access is intended to replace a practice called "screen scraping,""

Quicken doesn't use screen scraping, it uses Direct Connect. Your link is irrelevant.

Chris_QPW

10s_player said:

There are quite a few financial institutions and fintech products that are onboard with a new API data sharing standard through FDX. https://financialdataexchange.org/FDX/The Consortium/FDX/The-Consortium/Members.aspx?hkey=362ecd23-b752-48aa-b104-a99e916276c8

Forgive me if I don't share your optimism on the subject.

There was "quite a few financial institutions" that started using Direct Connect in the past too.  There were about 4000 in fact.  But there are more than 35,000 financial institutions in the US alone.  That number is down to about 2,400 and going down.

So, the number of financial institutions supporting a given standard might sound impressive, but since it isn't a universal standard, the users will be in the same boat where they need aggregation and that there will be a multitude of methods used, and the problems that go with them.

Yes, I "feel a bit better" that they are in fact working towards a standard, but I doubt that it will become universal an solve the problem, nor do I actually believe that it is a good way to go.

When you compare OFX to this FDX the first thing you notice is where data is stored and how complex the communication paths are.  OFX is a much better system in my opinion.  I certainly won't be looking forward to any changes over to it.  I will probably stop using Quicken or any other system that uses aggregation if this comes to pass at the financial institution that I have decided to consolidate my accounts at.

BTW several years ago the EU made all of their financial institutions support either or both of one of two protocols for this purpose.  OFX was one of those.

Chris_QPW

I should state something about my statement here:

There is no way that Quicken Inc can dictate to the financial institution on this.
Charles Schwab didn't ask Quicken Inc (or even Intuit) for permission, they decided, and then worked with the "aggregators" on a timeline.  That is about the most you can expect the financial institution working with the other parties to try to do it smoothly (even though they failed at that).

Quicken Inc might put up a front on how nice this is and such, and maybe some of them even believe it, but they aren't in the driver's seat, the financial institutions are.

Whereas I don't believe that Quicken Inc is in "the driver's seat", I do believe that they are "at the table".
Both Intuit and Quicken Inc would certainly want a say in this and as such at least Intuit has people in the community, and I have no doubt that they believe that supporting this new standard is the way forward.

So even though I believe that Schwab is "calling the shots" as far as what it is going to do, and the same will be true of each financial institution, certainly Intuit/Quicken Inc will be on the side encouraging this, not trying to stop it.

There is what we would like to see in this world, and then there is what it is going to do whether we like it or not.  You could get 100,000 votes for not doing this and I don't think it would change what they are going to do in the least.