unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ and A
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Complaint Department: Money 2005/6

Q) Who/what is Yodlee that M05 keeps talking about?

[Relevant to Money2005 (v.14) and up]

A) Yodlee is an Internet service company specializing in "aggregation" of your financial information from any financial institution (FI) that exposes any human-usable user interface (UI) to you via the web. You setup web accounts with all of your providers, then tell Yodlee about them and give them your account/password info. Yodlee systems then pretend to be you and login in and "skim" the information out of the resulting web pages ("screen scraping" is another term-of-art for this), reformat it, and present it to you in some aggregate form. This allows all of this data to be collected even if the bank doesn't want to expose an OFX or similar low-level interface. Since there are only a handful of UIs that these banks buy (written, one presumes, by Oracle, Sun, HP, Unisys, CA and similar players and then personalized by/for the individual FIs) and only the very largest players are developing their own from scratch, Yodlee only has to figure out how to fake out this handful and then figure out which FIs are built on which software. It is resold by some folks like Fidelity (as "Fidelity Full View") and, now, Microsoft Money.

For about a decade, Microsoft and Intuit have been trying to get the FIs to adopt low-level standard interfaces designed exclusively to let some application ware like Money or Quicken interchange data with the FIs. For lots of reasons, some to be discussed shortly, a decade later relatively few FIs have adopted these interfaces. This has prevented Quicken and, to a larger degree owing to its smaller market share and the threat the FIs consider Microsoft, Money, from providing a seamless uniform interface to all of your FIs.

With Money 2005, Microsoft threw in the towel and decided that integrating with Yodlee (and, presumably, paying Yodlee real money) was the only way to get lots of FIs integrated with Money. They claimed to have added thousands of institutions not previously supported for data downloads to Money in M05. Yodlee is how they did it. If the banks uniformly supported something like OFX well, Money could readily do what Yodlee is offering to do with good results, ease of use, and broad support from the FIs. Microsoft encapsulating Yodlee under Money is essentially a concession that a decade of futzing with QIF and OFC and OFX has failed because they could only add thousands of institutions at this late date by going the Yodlee route. The FIs couldn't be made to care about supporting OFX.

Why didn't the banks support the low-level interface? Apparently they couldn't make a business case to do so. Another reason is probably that they didn't want some other entity, much less Microsoft, "owning" the interaction with the customer. This is probably why Money found it necessary to include hooks for all of the branding support to make sure you see the FIs logo on the account register and so on. The FIs don't want Intuit, or, probably especially, Microsoft, getting in the middle of their customer relationship. Another reason is probably that they can't see any way to make more money off their customers by supporting the low-level interfaces. People won't pay extra for it, relatively few people use them, and relatively few of these people consider failure to support these interfaces cause to move their money to another FI.

Given all of this, improvements to make OFX work better are probably unlikely and so is increased adoption of OFX-like interfaces by the FIs. The FIs don't see a need to spend a dime in this direction. Yodlee wouldn't exist if the banks and so forth were stepping up to the plate. Yodlee couldn't do what they are doing without the FIs tacit acceptance--since it would be very easy for the FIs to play with their web sites enough to wreak havoc on Yodlee. But the FIs don't add their own low-level interfaces and do tolerate Yodlee; they apparently don't see a business case for doing anything else.

So what's wrong with Yodlee? Several things come to mind.

First, it's inherently an unstable technology. Yodlee's entire Reason for Being is that the FIs have not broadly supported a uniform low-level interface--e.g., OFX or similar--for transport of data to the customer, which would enable Money or Quicken to be the interface and tool for aggregation. Yodlee's entire model is to get around this by exploiting the high-level interfaces the FIs have supported to collect the same data. It's a fake-job. Because of this, it is less reliable than a purpose-built interface designed to do what Money is trying to do. As Joe Guidera posted, "the upside of [Money's integration of Yodlee] is that many institutions not previously available for use with Money are now available. The downside is, that from experience the technology is unreliable (at best). While I can't say this is necessarily the fault of Yodlee (it can easily be issues with the target web site), nevertheless it's much less reliable than the 'direct connect' (read custom) technology prior versions of Money used."

Second, when it doesn't work, there's much less chance of getting a resolution. Before Money+Yodlee, if you had a problem with downloaded data, the problem was either your FI's or Microsoft's. Maybe you could get your bank to care. Maybe. Add Yodlee to the equation, and, if you're an FI, you disown the whole thing if the data looks right on the human-readable web site Yodlee is skimming. That leaves you with Microsoft--Yodlee isn't working for you in this scenario, they're working for Microsoft. So now Microsoft owns 100% of the problem and your only hope is working any problems through MS Money Support. Good luck.

For the third concern over the Money+Yodlee integration we come fill circle back to the customer management issue. Yodlee views their value-add in terms of enabling FIs (not Microsoft or Quicken) to capture the entire customer interaction with them and with their competitors. It's all about "customer retention and cross-sell marketing, [so] aggregation can significantly increase an institution's per customer profitability" and "significant opportunity to use aggregated data to grow customer relationships through offers tailored to meet particular customer needs". Translated from marketing-speak, this means the FIs can monopolize you as a customer and mine all of your data to find more ways to transfer money from your pocket to theirs. This is certainly consistent with everything else about M05 that tries, first and foremost, to monetize your relationship with Microsoft and the MSN properties instead of just providing a tool you can use to manage your finances.

Some research after a posting by William R. Wood put me onto another example, referenced below and discussed in better words than mine in a newsgroup posting, demonstrative of Yodlee's "value proposition" to its customers--not you, by the way. They are there to help the FIs find ways to drain more money from your wallet into theirs based on things they can learn from data about your financial activity you let them handle. If you read these and then think Yodlee is doing anything that's in your best interest, then by all means sign up today.

Note that somewhere along the way Microsoft added a second "third party download" service named CashEdge. They may be better or worse in terms of stability and underlying motive than Yodlee.

References:
What's wrong with Yodlee
Yodlee describes what they offer to FIs
Yodlee does it again

Please see this disclaimer if you are using Money 2005 or this comment if you are using Money 2006.

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