Throttling of Order status from Charles Schwab

George Friedman

I notice that Quicken throttles my investment updates from Charles Schwab. Updates that a year ago only took seconds now take hours. or at least 20 minutes. Does anyone else notice this slowdowns caused by Quicken throttling?

Tom Young

Well, "Yes" and "No."

As I understand it, having never had an Account that used Express Web Connect, EWC typically has been something along the lines of a "once a day" polling of the Financial Institution with this generally happening at night.  When Schwab went to EWC I certainly noticed the change in availability of information from Direct Connect.  With DC I could create a transaction with Schwab, then immediately go to Quicken and download from Schwab and that transaction would be there, but that was not the case with EWC.

However, yesterday I initiated a cash transfer between accounts at Schwab and, just for grins, did a download from Schwab and the transfer showed up in the two affected Accounts!  I have seen other SuperUsers claim that asking for a download from Schwab is initiating a new polling of information and that seemed to be the case with yesterday's transfer.

Quicken is pretty closed-mouth about what they are doing and how they are doing it so I don't know if the claim about EWC is refreshing information with each requested download is correct, or not.  And, it could be the case that Quicken is phasing in changes in EWC+ (to give it its correct name) in some fashion such that different users could have different experiences.

ADDED: Today (9/2) I transferred cash between two Schwab accounts and made a purchase of Schwab's money fund, which will happen at end of day, then went into Quicken to manually input the two transactions.  I then did an Update Transactions in one of the affected Accounts, and nothing downloaded from Schwab.  I gave it a few minutes more and downloaded again, with no transactions downloaded, so it's not really clear what's going on.

Chris_QPW

One thing that I have noticed about Express Web Connect is that is "caches" information to pretend like it is faster and maybe to take the load off of the Intuit/financial institution's servers.

One has to understand that the first link in the chain is that Quicken Desktop syncs with the Quicken Connect Service server, which is also referred to as the Quicken Cloud/Quicken Cloud dataset.

What I see is the first time I do one of these syncs it is "slower" then the second time I do it, when I do it right away.  Example.  One Step Update with two different usernames with an account in each, 18 seconds.
Run One Step Update again, 5 seconds.

Clearly the 5 second one isn't really going all the way to the financial institution for the data.  I'm guessing that it simply goes to the Quicken Cloud dataset and returns what it has.

I haven't pinned it down exactly, but I notice the "caching" goes on for quite some time.  In general if I come back an hour later it is back to actually fetching the data.

So, this isn't even the old traditional "Express Web Connect connects once a day" behavior.  And frankly that behavior hasn't be true for most financial institutions for many years.  Some of them were near real time before Quicken change the connection flow about a year and a half ago.

The old flow was:
Quicken -> Intuit -> Financial institution's website

The new flow is:
Quicken -> Quicken Connection Services/Quicken Cloud dataset -> Intuit -> Financial institution's website