Tremendous Lack of Support For Canadian Institutions

I've been running Quicken along side one of its competing products and I have to say, most of the institutions I deal with here in Canada are not supported by Quicken Connect. It's actually quite ridiculous.

Like how is it that you do not support American Express on Quicken Connect with all the other competing vendors through their aggregators are able to support it? That's just one example. Only 1/3 of the accounts I have are supported by Quicken Connect.

Please tell me there are improvements in the works for supporting more institutions because otherwise, I really don't see any reason to stick with Quicken For Mac (Canada).

Comments

  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    @MoMoney99 FYI, this forum is a user-to-user forum, with some help from a small team of Quicken moderators. You're not speaking to Quicken management when you post here.

    In terms of financial institutions, the generalized answer is that it's up to the financial institutions, not Quicken; Quicken supports every financial institution that signs on. So the first thing I'd suggest is contacting AmeX support and or one or two of your other financial institutions to ask if they support Quicken, and if not, why not. There are many reasons why a financial institution may choose to not support Quicken. Depending on the level of connectivity, there may be an annual fee to pay to Intuit, the company which runs connectivity services for Quicken. It may require them running a separate server, or software to enable secure Quicken access. It may be that they don't want their support agents having to support Quicken users. It may be that they don't believe many other customers use Quicken, and so it's not worth the time and/or cost to support it. Or it may b a mistake in their setup with Intuit, where Canadian connectivity is separate from US connectivity. Only the financial institutions can provide an answer. Of course, their front-line support people may not know the business or technical reasons why their company has chosen what they have.
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • MoMoney99
    MoMoney99 Member ✭✭✭
    > @jacobs said:
    > In terms of financial institutions, the generalized answer is that it's up to the financial institutions, not >Quicken;

    That's simply not true. Virtually all the institutions support aggregation services that pull transactions from our accounts. Whether it's Yodlee, Plaid or some other aggregation service. Quicken is not unique here in this space. Why then are they the only provider that is unable to pull transactions from these institutions?
  • Chris_QPW
    Chris_QPW Member ✭✭✭✭
    MoMoney99 said:
    Why then are they the only provider that is unable to pull transactions from these institutions?
    Maybe because they depend on Intuit as their aggregator.

    As @jacobs has said:
    jacobs said:
    In terms of financial institutions, the generalized answer is that it's up to the financial institutions, not Quicken; Quicken supports every financial institution that signs on.
    But there is of course a flip side to this.  Financial institutions might not like the terms that Intuit insists on, and also Intuit might not be in a hurry to provide support for financial institutions that it considers outside of its desired business domain (and this might also be partly up to Quicken Inc).


    For instance one could argue that these days downloading transactions in the EU is easier than in the US and Canada.  Several years ago, the EU required their financial institutions to support one or both of two standardize protocols.  One of them is the OFX protocol (Which is the same as Direct Connect used in Quicken).
    In Canadian none of the financial institutions seem to be interested in the OFX protocol/Direct Connect.  And in the US only about 2,500 financial institutions support it, out of more than 35,000.  And so, there isn’t any standard for this in the US or Canada.  Nice to be in a “free system”, right?  That leaves "aggregators" that work like Express Web Connect.  As in "we won't adhere to any standard and make this easy for you. Instead, you will connect to our website's that aren't standardized and always changing, in whatever way we feel like this week."

    But Quicken Inc (and even Intuit before they sold Quicken) have made it very clear that they don't feel they have the resources to support other countries.  So even though it might be easier to add financial institutions on the EU, than in the US/Canada it doesn't matter.

    So even if it is doable on a technical level, it is a no go on the business level.

    Each company chooses what they are going to support based on what they think they can do and where they think they can make a profit.

    If you ask me, I think that Quicken Inc finds the Canadian customer base to be more of a pain in the side, than a good source of future development.

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  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    MoMoney99 said:
    > @jacobs said:
    > In terms of financial institutions, the generalized answer is that it's up to the financial institutions, not >Quicken;

    That's simply not true. 
    It is true, whether you choose to believe it or not.

    MoMoney99 said:
    Virtually all the institutions support aggregation services that pull transactions from our accounts. Whether it's Yodlee, Plaid or some other aggregation service. Quicken is not unique here in this space. Why then are they the only provider that is unable to pull transactions from these institutions?
    A financial institution needs to sign an agreement with Quicken or Intuit (I'm not sure whose contract it is) for Quicken to work with that financial institution. If the financial institution doesn't sign, then Quicken (Intuit) doesn't work with them. Depending on the level of service, the contract doesn't necessarily involve money, but one of the things it does is give Quicken (Intuit) technical/IT contact information for whenever issues arise (as they inevitably do). Perhaps Yodlee or others have different business models; perhaps they're happy to impersonate users logging in without gaining official permission to do so. I have no knowledge of how they work; I only have some knowledge about how Quicken works with financial institutions that I have learned from Quicken officials over the years. 
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • MoMoney99
    MoMoney99 Member ✭✭✭
    > @Chris_QPW said:
    > If you ask me, I think that Quicken Inc finds the
    > Canadian customer base to be more of a pain in the side, than a good source of
    > future development.

    ^^^^ THIS! I'm sorry but when apps like M*oneyWiz and Bankt*ivity can provide far better connections for Canadian customers than Quicken, which is the "legend" in this field, it speaks volumes. Quicken has always been the leader and its slowing losing out to these smaller developers who are more than willing to quickly make enhancements and add connectivity to their apps. I feel like Quicken is the Titanic, slow moving and the other apps are like speedy Yachts or something like that - poor analogy but you get my point.
  • Chris_QPW
    Chris_QPW Member ✭✭✭✭
    MoMoney99 said:
    > @Chris_QPW said:
    > If you ask me, I think that Quicken Inc finds the
    > Canadian customer base to be more of a pain in the side, than a good source of
    > future development.

    ^^^^ THIS! I'm sorry but when apps like M*oneyWiz and Bankt*ivity can provide far better connections for Canadian customers than Quicken, which is the "legend" in this field, it speaks volumes. Quicken has always been the leader and its slowing losing out to these smaller developers who are more than willing to quickly make enhancements and add connectivity to their apps. I feel like Quicken is the Titanic, slow moving and the other apps are like speedy Yachts or something like that - poor analogy but you get my point.
    Then one has to wonder why you are using Quicken instead of one other other products?

    Over on the Windows side there is over 30 years of code development, and that is both the reason it is feature rich and so "fragile" and hard to adapt to provide things like mobile/web syncing that really works well (without the constant reports of the Quicken data file being corrupted).

    But when you look to the Quicken Mac side some of its competitors have codebases that are older then it because of the rewrite that started in 2007 and has major "restarts" at least twice more.

    One might point to the "expertise" in the field, but lets face it there isn't anything that special about this kind of code.  So what gives Quicken a leg up?  Bigger size development team, sure, but in reality it was a very small group for a very long time during this period since the rewrite.  Well in fact one of the major things is the fact that the Intuit aggregation system all being there for them.  The very thing that you are complaining about, which isn't surprising, that is how it works.  But if now the others have a better system, then why are you using Quicken?  Better features?  There isn't any real reason they should be except that maybe Quicken Inc has picked better where to use their programming resources.

    Quicken Mac is a perfect example of "you can't do everything at once, so you have to pick what is most important".  And it is pretty clear that Quicken Inc feels that it priorities should be with the core product for its core user base (the US market).

    It isn't that Quicken Inc dislikes Canadian or any other market for that matter, but when a company decided to spend money they like to spend it where they think they can get the most for their money.
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