Quicken? Or Pentagon Federal Credit Union

Larry Epperson

Some of you may know the following, but just in case, here is what Pentagon Federal Credit Union sent me in an email yesterday:

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"Unfortunately, PenFed is not able to support automatic downloads to Quicken anymore.

While there are no technical limitations that should prevent automatic downloads, we are unable to provide technical support related to third party services. 

That said, you always have the option to manually download your transactions. 

For instructions, please see (web address won't paste here). It takes you to "Downloading Transaction History".

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Here is what it says on that page:

Use PenFed Online to download your transactions for use with popular money management programs like Quicken, Microsoft Money, and Mint, or to save them for your own records. This article shows you how.

Jul 19, 2023•Knowledge

Screen Scraping
For your security, PenFed does not encourage using financial planning apps that use screen-scraping techniques to collect account information.



Downloading Transactions
To export your recent transaction history for use in other applications, use the following procedures based on your specific type of account.

Checking, Savings, and Loans
To download transaction history for checking accounts, savings, accounts, and loans:

1. Log in to PenFed Online and click on the name of the account you want to download transaction history for.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click Download Transactions.
3. Select the transaction types you want to download from the Transaction Type dropdown menu:
   • All - downloads all available transactions.
   • Credits - downloads all transactions that increase the account balance.
   • Debits - downloads all transactions that decrease the account balance.
   • Checks - use this option to download all check-related transactions (if applicable).
4. Select the download format appropriate for your program from the Download Type dropdown menu:
   • Comma Separated Value (CSV)
   • Quicken Interchange Format (QIF)
   • Web Connect (QFX)
5. Click the date range to download from the Download options:
   • All - all available dates for the selected account type
   • By Date Range (then use calendar to select dates)
6. Click Download Transactions.

Repeat the process for each account for which you want to download transaction history.

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I have been using Quicken since early 90s. As I recall it was with Windows 3.1. I've had accounts with Pentagon Federal Credit Union for 46 years. It amazes, frustrates, and disappoints me that this problem cannot be solved.

Now it looks like I am faced with a decision. Do I find a substitute for Quicken? Or do I close my accounts with PFCU?

As my father often said, "Sad, but true."

😞

Larry Epperson

More on screen scraping:

https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/screen-scraping

Screen scraping is a data collection method used to gather information shown on a display to use for another purpose. Typically, screen scraping is used to collect data from one application to then translate it to another -- or, more controversially, to steal data.

Screen scraping has a variety of uses, both ethical and unethical. An app for transferring data from a legacy application to a modern UI is an ethical use case. Stealing data from applications, on the other hand, is an unethical use for screen scraping. 

 In 2019, screen scraping began to be phased out of banking, one of its larger use cases. This was done to ease security concerns surrounding the practice. Budgeting apps now must use a single open banking technology. To create more trust, some organizations route customer data through a secure application programming interface (API) to avoid the screen scraping process.

In banking, a third party will request users share their login information so it can access financial transaction data by logging into digital portals for the customers. A budgeting app can then retrieve the incoming and outgoing transactions across accounts.

While transferring data from a legacy program, a screen scraper must take the data coming from the legacy program, which is formatted for older terminals, and reformat it for newer operating systems or web browsers. The program must also reformat user inputs from the newer interface so the request can be handled as if it were the legacy application.

Open banking is the concept of sharing secured financial information that third-party developers can use for the creation of banking applications. This concept is based on the sharing of APIs, which lets an application use the same API to aggregate information from different accounts into one place. This is what enables a banking app to let users look at their multiple accounts from different banks in one place.

In the past, some banking apps would gather information using screen scraping. This process would require users to share their bank login credentials with the third-party app. The application would then log on to the user's accounts and screen scrape the needed data to show in the app.

By contrast, open banking now uses shared APIs, meaning the exact data needed is copied without requiring the user to share login credentials. The concept was introduced in 2018 and is now becoming a standard over the use of screen scraping.