Web Connect Versus Express Web Connect

JoelC

I thought I would share this experience.

I have three on-line accounts / bank cards at the same institution; that is, 1 for my personal accounts, 1 for my HoldCo accounts and 1 for my OpCo accounts as my financial institution is not setup to have one bank card for three separate entities (at least in Canada).

I setup my accounts to connect to my financial institution via Express Web Connect which worked well for the first few weeks (i.e., automatic update showed all three bank cards and Quicken Mobile account were updating correctly).

Over time the wheels fell off. Quicken went from showing 3 bank cards to 2 bank cards to 1 bank card (i.e., I suppose Quicken does not do well with multiple bank cards from the same financial institution). Quicken Mobile started to show my accounts as needing to be fixed / reconnected to on-line banking. The combined result was that Quicken was not properly updating my bank accounts (because it had lost the bank card information) and Quicken Mobile was no longer a viable method for entering transactions while away from my computer.

The fix was to deactivate all my accounts ties to the 3 bank cards and then re-activate them. This was time consuming given the number of accounts.

The fix was very short lived as within weeks the cycle reoccured with Quicken showing 3 bank cards to 2 bank cards to 1 bank card and Quicken Mobile showing my accounts needed to be fixed.

With that in mind, I went back to the older Web Connect method of connecting my accounts. While I do need to manually / separately download the transactions from my financial institution at least everything is reliable and working. Quicken is properly updating my bank accounts (albeit manually) and Quicken Mobile is again a viable method for entering transactions while away from my computer.

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @JoelC,

Thank you for coming to share your experiencing and this information.

Chris_QPW

Express Web Connect is a wild card by its nature. It can work well with some financial institutions (over some period of time) and not with others. And it seems to me with the fact that the Canadian version allows multiple currencies, the "risk" goes up.

If we are honest about all of this, Express Web Connect is a hack, just as "aggregation" is a hack.

The financial institutions have refused to standardize on a given protocol. That is what Direct Connect/the OFX standard was supposed to change, but at its height only about 4,500 financial institutions adopted it. That is out of more than 35,000 in the US alone. It is probably less than 2,000 now.

So, what is Express Web Connect? Well, the name gives a clue at how it started. "Web Connect" is nothing more than what the OFX server would have responded when sent the request for transactions in the OFX/Direct Connect protocol, but in file form.

So, the original Express Web Connect was "Log into the financial institution as the user and download the Web Connect/QFX file and import it." There are two problems with this. The first being that not all financial institutions even create Web Connect/QFX files. So, Intuit "branched out" and started getting the transactions in other formats and then converting them to OFX for Quicken to use.

The second problem came later, as more and more sites got hit by hackers, they started making logging in "especially as a machine" harder and harder. You now have MFA and other kinds of blocks, so just "logging in" is one of the biggest problems. Past that, sites change, and even though supposedly Intuit has an "agreement" with each of them on how to do get the transaction information, the truth is they find out if something broke the process after people start complaining that they aren't getting their transactions/errors are being thrown. How good Express Web Connect works depends on how stable that login and fetching process is at any given financial institution.

Intuit isn't alone is being an "aggregator" and there are a few of them out there, but they all are there for the very reason that then financial institutions won't adopt a standardized protocol. Years ago, the EU mandated that their financial institutions support one of two (or both) protocols for this (One being OFX), but the US and Canada are "free" and so our governments haven't mandated any standards.

That brings us to Express Web Connect +, which like Direct Connect doesn't seem to have sparked any interest in Canada (someone mentioned that another protocol was being created, and several Canadian financial institutions were supporting it, and Quicken should support it, but that has fallen on death ears here.).

Express Web Connect + is actually Intuit's implementation of FDX. As in a modern standardized protocol between Intuit and the financial institution instead of Express Web Connect's "agreements".

Since this has come out and we now know the real impact I would have to say that the new system hasn't lived up to what was expected.

But let me step back for one second and say, for the very fact that not all financial institutions will adopt this protocol the only overall affect is going to be more problems because you now have more protocols to deal with.

Unlike Direct Connect which is directly from Quicken (the program) and the financial institutions Express Web Connect and Express Web Connect + go through multiple servers all of which have the potential of messing up things. And on top of that, the "setup" for a new connection is much more complicated.

Right now, the major problems with Express Web Connect + are getting the authorization to work for everyone trouble free. A lot of that seems to be tied to the fact that this is being done through the web browser and depending on what the user has installed like popup blocker, cookie blockers and such or just using different web browsers this has turned into a major problem.

On top of that, you have a process where Quicken (the program) "syncs" with Quicken servers, which in turn talk to Intuit servers that talk to the financial institution's website. And lately something "upstream" of Quicken (the program) has changed and transactions are being dropped.

So, with all of that, is it any wonder that using a QFX file is so much more reliable than Express Web Connect/aggregators?

I will also mention that even though I don't count on them, I have setup where my Chase account can get the balance of my Synchrony and Macy's accounts, and they are constantly "not available". So, clearly whatever aggregator Chase uses is if anything worse than Express Web Connect.

JoelC

@Chris_QPW appreciate the deatiled explanation, very helpful. The "mess" that you describe only reinforces my decision to stick with Web Connect as the most reliable and most stable approach, np regrets here.

For that do know, the Canadian banking landscape is much different than that of the US in that the top 6 banks in Canada serve approximately 93% of all Canadians so this should be easy to do!

Thanks.

Chris_QPW

And yet those 6 banks have a worse track record than more financial institutions in the US as far as support for Quicken goes. 😢

JoelC

And that is a very sad commentary. Like I write, it should be easy, never said it was!