Franklin Templeton transition to Aspire Financial Services InvestLink

dungan3

Franklin Templeton transferred all of their reporting responsibilities to Aspire Financial today. 30 May 2023. I have access to my accounts through their website, but I do not see any option to down load into Quicken. When I attempted to add Aspire Financial accounts to my Quicken account it seems to work up to a point and then askes me to answer questions that I do not have answers to. Bottom line is there a way to add Aspire Financial account information into Quicken?

Frankx

Hi @dungan3,

I took a look at the financial institution directory, and also started the process of adding an account for "Aspire Financial" in Quicken and it appears that they allow connections including the Direct Connect, Express Web Connect and Web Connect methods. One would assume that you should know the answers to the questions or - as part of the transfer process - you should have received instructions on how to answer them from Franklin Templeton.

I would suggest that you contact either Franklin Templeton or Aspire Financial and ask them how you should proceed, as this does not appear to be a problem with Quicken.

Frankx

Boatnmaniac

@dungan3 - If you did not select Advanced Options during the setup process, then perhaps Quicken was attempting to set up your investment accounts with EWC….which is not capable of downloading investment transactions.

If you did not go the Advanced Options route previously, you might want to try doing Add Account, again, this time selecting Advanced Options and then selecting Direct Connect to see if that will get you set up.

dungan3

You got as far as I did, but then it asks for additional questions, User Name and Password. Quicken processes that information and then says that Aspire Financial requires additional information in order to connect. Quicken then shows a box that asks questions that were not specified when I set my security questions in Aspire. Still stumped.

Boatnmaniac

@dungan3 - A couple of questions:

1. Is www.aspirefinancial.com the URL you use when you go to log into your online account?
2. What kind of investment account(s) are they? Brokerage? IRA/Roth IRA? 401(k)? Or something else?

Ps56k2

what kind of extra questions ?
Are they the usual types of personal security questions or something else ?
Are they listed somewhere on the Aspire online website security section ?

Boatnmaniac

@dungan3 - I should have looked at the FIDIR.txt file earlier. This is the file that tells Quicken which financial institutions support Quicken, which connection methods they support and which types of accounts they support.

What the FIDIR file shows is that Aspire Financial does not support Investment accounts for download into Quicken.:

07073 07073 07073 Aspire Financial
https://www.aspirefinancial.com/
https://onlinebanking.aspirefinancial.com/pages/login.aspx ACTIVE
BANKING,ACCOUNTINFO&DIRECT
BANKING&WEB-CONNECT
BANKING,CREDIT,ACCOUNTINFO&EXP-WEB-CONNECT

• Aspire supports Direct Connect, Web Connect and Express Web Connect connection methods. This is what is shown in the Add Account set up picture in my earlier post.
• Aspire supports Bank and Credit accounts.
• What is not listed: Investment. This means that Aspire Financial does not support Investment accounts downloads into Quicken.

This explains why you were being prompted to provide security answers you had not entered….the account set up process was trying to connect you to Bank and Credit account(s) that you do not have and have not setup up security for.

I did not find any other similarly named "Aspire" financial institution in the FIDIR.

What this means is you will not be able to set up Aspire Financial to download into your investment account(s) in Quicken. Aspire will need to contract with Intuit to add that capability so you could contact them to request them to add Investments support.

You might want to contact Aspire to see if they might support investments downloads into Quicken via a financial institution other that uses a different URL that does not include "Aspire" in it. That kind of thing is not uncommon with credit cards but I don't think I've seen something like that for investment accounts before.

There is another option you might want to look into to see if it might give you a viable workaround option:

1. Does Aspire offer manual transactions downloads in Excel, CSV or OFX formats? If so, see #2.
2. Download and install ImportQIF which is a freeware converter app that can change Excel, CSV and OFX files into QIF files. You can read up on it and download it from https://www.quicknperlwiz.com/ . It was developed and is maintained by a long-time Quicken user and active participant in this Community forum.
3. Once you download the Excel, CSV or OFX file from Aspire and convert it to a QIF file, you can then try to import the QIF file into Quicken.

Your other option at this point is to manually manage your Aspire account(s) in Quicken.