Wall Street banks are starting to throttle personal-finance startups
Jonathan Marino, Nov. 5, 2015, 11:06 AM, Source
Wall Street banks have had enough of personal-finance apps scraping their data.
The Wall Street Journal's Robin Sidel reports that Mint.com's personal-finance app has been "throttled" or that the data being shared with the app is being restricted.
These apps give users a way to put all their financial data in one place — drawing information from accounts at multiple firms
The point is convenience. Mint, for example, pitches itself as a way to pull" all your financial information into one place, so you can finally get the entire picture."
Wells Fargo has "added an additional level of security to its accounts last month that prevented aggregators from being able to automatically retrieve customer data, according to a person familiar with the matter," according to the Journal's story.
JPMorgan also restricted access to Mint, the Journal reported. Other personal-finance apps have also been impacted by big banks' 'throttling,' as well, Business Insider has learned. These include apps run by Mint's parent company Intuit, according to a person who spoke with Business Insider under the condition of anonymity.
Quicken, the personal-finance app owned by Intuit, has also seen its access to bank customers' data restricted in recent weeks.
Some users have taken to Twitter to air grievances.
Wells Fargo users are complaining of restricted access to apps.
"In our continuous effort to enhance the security of our digital banking services, we often add additional layers of authentication to protect our customers’ information,” a Wells Fargo spokesman said to Business Insider.
"These efforts may inadvertently impact the ability of financial aggregators to gather customer information."
The bank did not identify how many apps have been impacted.