The most important thing to know before you buy

donth

In 2021 Quicken was sold to Aquiline Capital Partners by H.I.G Capital, who purchased it in 2016. Once a company starts getting passed between private equity firms, products tend to go downhill, as the owners just try to extract profits before selling it to the next one.

donth

For a sample of the service you'll receive, there's been a problem with downloading PayPal Credit, Mastercard & Crypto transactions they've been working on since June 20th.

Chris_QPW

As a long time user of Quicken I don't find that your example of bad service correlates with the history.

Express Web Connect has been a problem from the day Intuit introduced it. It was and still is a hack for an industry that will not adopt a standard protocol for downloading transactions.

Some financial institutions have kept their part of it more stable than others. PayPal has never been one of that group.

What's more over one of the fundamental parts of that hack is Intuit (Quicken Inc's aggregator) server login in as if it is you and getting the transaction in some "agreed method", and because of security concerns, the financial institutions have purposely been making it harder for a server/computer to log in as if it was you. So even noticing that Express Web Connect is having more login in failures than before doesn't prove a good correlation with the company being sold.

And I will say one think about "investments". The number of people that currently work on Quicken products is substantially more than were working on it with Intuit. That isn't to say the private capital investors aren't pushing the company to make more money at perhaps at the expense of quality, but so far it hasn't directly affected the staffing.

donth

I have to admit this was something of a frustration post. That was one sample. My credit union has a similar situation going on for about 3 months. I think my biggest issue is lack of communication. It'd be nice if there was at least a periodic acknowledgement the problems are still being worked. Also, if they are on the institution's end, let us know.

In their defense, I have run into the security issues you mentioned that were resolved, and other issues that were resolved in a reasonable amount of time. Also, PayPal (via Synchrony) is my most problematic account in Quicken. Other institutions have far fewer problems.

I also have to admit that my private capital attitude is influenced by a product I support that went plummeting downhill after a couple of acquisitions.

jacobs

I think the corporate ownership of Quicken is probably one of the least important things to know before you buy. 😉 We're all free to speculate, but…

H.I.G. Capital basically rescued Quicken from benign neglect (at best) under former parent Intuit. They helped stabilize the company by adding development staff, increasing phone support, breaking the cycle of once-a-year product updates, raising prices with the subscription pricing model, and launching a new online-only product (Simplifi) to complement the desktop-based traditional products. Active users increased, sales increased by about 50%, revenues increased, and H.I.G. said the results of its investment in Quicken were “outstanding”, and they likely got a good return on their investment when they sold to Aquiline.

Here's what Quicken CEO Eric Dunn said about the transition from H.I. G to Aquiline: “H.I.G. is not a growth-oriented expansion firm. They felt their work was done, and they did what they had set out to do, which is to carve out an asset with a lot of potential from a parent company which had neglected it.” Under Aquiline, I expect to see Quicken continue to broaden its roots by continuing to grow Simplifi and adding new products and services to grow its revenue.

There is no sign that the products are going "downhill as the owners just try to extract profits before selling it" again. I'm a Quicken Mac user, and the development team is continuing to improve the product and to add features users have been asking for. Yes, there are definitely lots of problems with connectivity services, but as @Chris_QPW said, this is neither a new problem nor the result of letting the program deteriorate.

donth

First off, I have to admit this was something of a frustration post. Users being directed to a Community Alert that hasn't been updated in 4 months, with no details on the cause, course of action, or a timeline is just bad support. Even a monthly "no progress, but you haven't been forgotten" would be an improvement.

An example is exactly that, an example. The history is more extensive. For another current example, my credit union has had a known issue approaching 3 months, with the same message from support that it's been reported, escalated, and has no ETA.

If that's how I dealt with my users, I'd no longer be employed. At least I feel I shouldn't be, but maybe that's just where we are these days.

If these problems are on the institutions' end, let us know, so we can properly direct our ire.

In Quicken's favor:

I've run into "enhanced security" issues that were resolved in a reasonable amount of time, as well as other connectivity issues that were handled well.

Also, I agree that PayPal (via Synchrony Bank) isn't particularly good at running these things.

Other accounts, which I of course don't use, have been running pretty smoothly.

Finally, In all fairness, my private capital attitude is influenced by a product I support that took a nosedive after being acquired by a second firm. They drove off everyone who knew the product by focusing entirely on new business, abandoning the old model focused on supporting existing customers. Maybe this is different.

Chris_QPW

@donth said "If these problems are on the institutions' end, let us know, so we can properly direct our ire."

I think in most cases Quicken Inc either doesn't know this or feels that they are between a rock and a hard place.

Recently I posted what I believe the current communication flow I have circled what Quicken Inc has control of:

And I should point out even for Direct Connect, it is Intuit that has the contracts with the financial institutions not Quicken Inc, so for escalating even Direct Connect/Web Connect(QFX) file they are obligated to do it through Intuit.

This means that there is LOT of put in someone's inbox and wait and then passing along kinds of things going on.

jacobs

Users being directed to a Community Alert that hasn't been updated in 4 months, with no details on the cause, course of action, or a timeline is just bad support. Even a monthly "no progress, but you haven't been forgotten" would be an improvement.

@donth I understand your frustration, but Quicken is damned if they do and damned if they don't. For awhile, they had the moderators updating each alert weekly to say it was ongoing — e.g. "you haven't been forgotten" — but then users complained that updates which didn't give them any insight into the problem or how long it would be ongoing was annoying.

As @Chris_QPW said, I think in many cases, the folks at Quicken don't actually know the status of the problem, because it's between Intuit and the financial institution. I think many users think of Quicken as a very large company, but it's not — perhaps 150 employees (not counting call center support representatives). I don't know, but I believe they actually have very few people on connectivity because they don't control most of it. And again I don't know, but I suspect they don't get great day by day communication from Intuit about all the open trouble tickets.

And there's one other important factor: for many financial institutions, expending time and effort on support for Quicken (and other third-party applications) is a pain, and a low priority. Allowing outside services to connect to their servers creates the potential for security issues, which is their absolute top priority. Quicken isn't in a position to push big financial institutions around; in some cases, I know Quicken has had to jump to make changes or face being cut off by a financial institution. I believe that's why Quicken never discloses when a problem is with a financial institution; they can't risk incurring the wrath of a financial institution.

Imagine if Quicken, in the name of offering better customer service to their customers, posted alerts saying "XYZ Financial has a problem with improperly-formatted QFX downloads, and we're waiting for them to implement a fix" or "XYZ Financial implemented a changed security protocol, and our connectivity provider Intuit has not yet implemented the programming changes necessary for us to connect to XYZ again." That might make you feel a little better if you're a Quicken customer, but it doesn't make the solution happen any sooner. And if it causes Quicken users to flood the financial institution with support calls demanding a fix, then the financial institution gets upset at Quicken and may rethink whether to support Quicken. So Quicken takes the low-key approach of telling its users, "yes, we're aware there is a problem with downloading from this financial institution; we don't know when it will be resolved." Frustrating to customers, to be sure, but perhaps the only practical way they can go.

Chris_QPW

I think @jacobs said best, but I'm going to add one more "history tidbit". I personally think that Intuit is terrible at customer service in general and that it goes all the way through their organization. The history is that even when Quicken was part of Intuit the relationship between the Quicken group and the "connection scripts group" was less than ideal (as reported by an Intuit/Quicken group employee) probably because Quickbooks gets the priority. That employee (naively in my opinion) thought this would change when Quicken was its own company and now paying Intuit for that same service that it would get better. To me that is like saying that if I worked in Quicken Inc and needed to get something done and people wouldn't do it for me, if I instead bought Quicken and made the same request it would get done. Not very likely especially when Intuit knows that they have Quicken Inc in their back pockets since it would be horribly hard for them to switch to another service provider.

So, even when this was only Intuit, "script problem" always went into a black hole and maybe came out of the queue months later. And I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised that if I had contact with an employee in the "scripts group" that person would tell me that they are horribly understaffed for the ridiculous task of trying to maintain 15,000+ ad hock connections with the financial institutions.