Fidelity Full View and Yodlee
| I have been toying with the idea of setting up a Yodlee account for quite some time. I've heard from a few other people that it is a great way to see a snapshot of all your banking, credit card, loan, bill pay, and investment transactions in one place. The only problem was I couldn't figure out how or where to go to set up the account. I was poking around the Yodlee website, when I came across this page... it has a list of companies that use Yodlee to power services they provide for their customers. Since we already have a few accounts with Fidelity, I decided to try out Fidelity's Full View service, which is powered by Yodlee. I set up our credit card, mortgage, investment and banking accounts in just under an hour (for anyone who follows this blog, you know how many accounts we have and how amazing it is that it took so little time). Full View has different modules that can be customized. I am using the transactions, net worth, and investments modules. Some modules that I'm not using include email, rewards (credit card and other reward programs), and the other accounts module (bill pay, reservations and travel info, and calendar info). One thing I really, really like about Full View is that it provides a linkage to my 401(k) plan and another investment account we have with providers that don't otherwise provide statement downloads on their websites. Because I can't get transaction information for these accounts into MS Money, Fidelity Full View is one place where I can truly get a full snapshot of our investments, without any manual entry of transactions. I also like that we can add multiple accounts from one provider (ie we have two Chase credit card log-ins because our accounts aren't joint, and we also have multiple ShareBuilder and Fidelity accounts that I was able to add to the service with no problem). But the really cool part is that it tallies how much money we've had go into and out of investment accounts, bank accounts, and credit card accounts over a certain time period. I have mine set up to be two weeks, and I can see that we've spent $833 on our credit cards in the last two weeks... yikes! This is all updated continuously and is as up-to-the-minute as it can get... a big benefit over waiting until MBNA posts a statement before being able to load the info into MS Money (another one of my pet peeves... and I refuse to manually key credit card transactions into Money). I decided to see how truly up-to-the-minute this service was... I pulled up Full View at work, and then ran down to our in-building credit union and deposited a check. Ran back up to my desk (ok, I took the elevator), checked my browser, and by golly the deposit had already shown up on the screen! I have found a few cons... while my employer's credit union is available on Full View; my other credit union isn't, at least not for banking. Not a deal breaker as far as I'm concerned. The other con is that I can't see when payments are due on credit cards, which I have heard was available on previous version's of the Yodlee service (version 4.x, versus the version 6.x that Fidelity is running). I'm going to email Yodlee customer service about both of these. The pros are many... instant net worth, investment, banking, and credit card balances. Full View is a great source for transactional information. I really like seeing how much has come into and out of various account aggregates over a period of time. I think this would be very helpful for people trying to get out of debt or for couples that often aren't in-sync with their spending. Full View also has a printer-friendly version of what is on the screen, including transaction-level detail for the credit card, bank, and investment accounts. Another huge pro is that you can get a view of what is going on with all your credit card accounts with one sign-on. This means that even those cards you don't use and don't often check are visible and you will be able to see almost immediately if any activity occurs on those cards. I encourage everyone to check out the list of Yodlee providers, the service is completely free, and it provides some great data in a nice, low-maintenance, format. I would like to hear other people's thoughts on both Full View and the Yodlee service as provided by other companies. |
posted by savvy at 5/20/2006 07:04:00 AM
Comments on "Fidelity Full View and Yodlee"
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Cap said ... (9:23 AM) :
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jythonuser said ... (4:40 PM) :
post a commentah it's at https://www.yodlee.com/newarch/index.do
there's also yodlee carddirect and billdirect. its right on the bottom of the front page. both uses the oncenter account, I believe.
but yeah i use yodlee oncenter like many others for the quick snapshot for all my accounts.
it gets annoying when they have trouble updating account though.
cap - thanks for the link! I set up a few of my accounts, and it seems the only difference is an Alerts section... which has the information about credit card payments! I'll be setting up the rest of my accounts later today!
I use Yodlee through Wachovia and I really like it also. I've only found one thing that really disappoints me with the service.
I have an account I use to keep tax money in for the check I write to the Feds every year. I don't consider this part of my net worth but still want to see it in my account summary. Yodlee doesn't seem to support exclusion of accounts in the net worth calculation.
For those of you who set up HSBC accounts, they use Yodlee for their single view application as well.
I have to admit though that I don't use it as often as I thought I would. Once in a while I'll check to see if some of our less-active accounts have had any activity but for net work calcs I rely on MS Monay.
ninjapidgeon- couldn't you set up an account that tracks your tax money liability. It would offset the money you are saving and give you the correct net worth. That is what I do in MS Money for my property taxes.
I use it through Wachovia too and I love it. I look at it several times a week. I hadn't thought of having my spouse use it, too. That's a good idea, Savvy. I also use it to track all my mileage accounts, and the few rewards accounts it supports.
Cons:
As others have said, sometimes for no apparent reason various accounts have errors and can't update for days or even weeks. This happens especially often with mileage accounts.
Not all my accounts are in their system. My mortgage, for example, is not in there. I think this is the fault of the mortgage company being in the dark ages and not having online access, but it's a Wachovia mortgage, so it still just rankles that my Wachovia "One Stop" Yodlee view can't see my mortgage account. My 529 brokerage firm isn't in there either, so I update it manually every month.
Mostly, though, I love it. Thanks for the reminder that I can use it thru fidelity. I am always thinking of ditching Wachovia in favor of a local credit union, so it's nice to know I could still use Yodlee thru my Fidelity account if I ditched Wachovia.
The Wachovia Mortgage issue is being addressed. Wachovia was very late to the national mortgage game and with the pending purchase that Wachovia made expect all the bells and whistles soon. Also, as a giant Yodlee fan, I'd give up on Quicken and MS Money. Too much work, too little reward. Also, if you love Yodlee like I do you need to send e-mails to your provider to let yodlee know that the link is broken. They fix it pretty quickly but it is Yodlee's responsibility not the myriad of financial companies who provide the thru service. Also, try complex option strategies on Quicken and or MS Money and you will suddenly love your brokerage Yodlee service....
Hi,
This is PeterH from Yodlee, really like this blog!
If you or anyone have issues with data quality or features and things you would like to add to the product, please check out our forum.
http://forum.yodlee.com
tx
P
I see that my MS Money software is powered by Yodlee. Can you see different things through the Fidelity Yodlee service than you can through MS Money? If so, then I might ditch Money and just go with one of the free services. Thanks.
Hi, Microsoft Money has lots of different things that we don't do at Yodlee, but from a pure data point of view, and aggregating accounts, they are the same.
The service at Fidelity, is actually quite unique since it also is integrated into a bunch of other elements on their web site, including retirement calculators and so on.
tx
P
Hmm, I just recently signed up for yodlee oncenter, not realizing other accounts had a similar service. Is there any difference between say the Fidelity yodlee service and the oncenter version?
Wow, I really like that - thanks for the tip!
My only quibble is that there's an error causing my bank of america credit card to display twice, doubling it's effect through my portfolio.
I set up aggregate account info through Fidelity yesterday (I keep my Roth IRA there) and I LOVE it.
The only concern I have is the security. I basically gave up all usernames/passwords to all my financial accounts on the Web, so, if anyone gains access to this account, they'll have access to ALL of them. There's even a hyperlink next to each account saying "Logon automatically"; so, you just need to gain access to the Web site, not to the data.
Being a software developer, I know that there's no such thing as absolutely secure software. I'm thinking about removing all the information and going back to manually entering information in Quicken (and I also keep a separate Excel spreadsheet on my PDA that I update once a week to get my current net worth). I have a separate computer for my financial stuff, it's not connected to anything and it will never be. Only the paranoid survive :))
Well anyday i will go with Quicken as it can do lot more than Yodlee.
Banks do provide solutions from Yodlee as its a cheap alternative to attract customers with mean crappy functionalities which does 10% of qhat quicken does.
When it comes to security Yodlee is a big NO NO.
I have been using fidelity full view and while I like it, I want to see one function there that Yodlee offers (or at least I think fidelity full view does not). I want to be able to group my accounts like retirement, non-retirement, education funds etc. The net worth shows me everything but it would be good to see a breakup of my retirement, education funds and so on.