Urgent: Escalation re: Unresolved 30+ Day Fidelity Failure (Customer Logs Already Provided)

It appears to be an online only solution. If internet is not available, neither is [Removed - 3rd Party Software]. Is that correct?

Personally, I don't think most of the people in this thread the full extent of the problem/system.

For instance, the belief that the Quicken Inc CEO isn't aware of this problem. I'm 99.99% sure he is. This isn't Microsoft, this is a company of about 200 employees.

It is my belief that the complexity of the system that has been created has finally really struck.

And it is my belief that the reason it is worse with Fidelity than the ones before it (which I might add exceeded 30 days of problems too) is Fidelity seems to have a much more complicated system. Where multiple securities can be used as "cash" and such. And maybe they are also either lacking the right people to implement this and/or they don't really consider it a priority.

This isn't something that you can "contact the Quicken Inc CEO" and it will be resolved for the very reason that a lot of this is out of the hands of any Quicken Inc employee.

But I also suspect that there is a lot of "fault" in the Quicken Inc domain.

And overall, I think the biggest failure comes from the financial institutions themselves, and even our government. OFX was created, and then financial institutions didn't come to the table, and so we got aggregators. And the notion is that this is somehow "normal".

Let's see:

OFX, Personal finance program talks directly to the financial institution's OFX server over the publicly available standardized OFX protocol.

Express Web Connect + (or FDX when referring to the part from Intuit/aggregator to financial institution).

Quicken (the program) → Quicken server → Intuit server → financial institution server

The very system pushes an aggregator into the flow, but it gets worse. Quicken Inc wanted to monitor all the problems, so they inserted their server(s) into the mix. What's more they system they used is "Sync to Quicken Cloud" the same one used for Sync to Mobile/Web, which we all know is far from problem free.

One of the things that surprised me when I saw the very first financial institution switch from Direct Connect to Express Web Connect + is the lack of duplicate transactions being downloaded. The unique Ids changed, why weren't there any duplicates? (in fact, there were some duplicates and there were missing transactions, but not the flood of duplicate you would expect).

This points to one thing. Quicken Inc has developed a "remove duplicates" on the Quicken Inc servers before the transactions are even synced to Quicken (the program).

The complexity of this system is staggering.

As for the communications of all of this. How do you communicate a complex problem that no one probably has access to all the needed information or understanding of each problem?

I find it strange that people think that Quicken Inc is sitting on their thumbs while such big and visible problems are occurring.

But there is just so much they can do. First off, most of this is out of their hands. And second I think there isn’t a single person in all of the three companies who has a grasp on all the different problems. They are going to tackle them as they become aware of them and when time permits. Quicken users seem to think they are this huge percentage of customers at the financial institutions, when in fact they tend to be a small fraction of their customers.

You should also understand something Quicken Inc is a company that has about 200 employees. There is no way it is telling companies like Fidelity what to do. It is the other way around.

Very well written post, Viraf - much better than my question below.

My question for the Quicken executive team - are you incompetent or uncaring? Because you must be one or the other, or both! This lack of attention and communication regarding a topic affecting so many users is outrageous. Are you purposely trying to impair your brand? If so, it's working….