A relatively simple fix for this would be for banks to allow me to create a read-only user ID and a transactional user ID...I could hand the read-only credentials to services like Plaid. I suggested this to Fidelity over a year ago and they looked at me like I was crazy.
Banking in the US is so horrible at the moment. there’s an immense opportunity for someone to come through and give a better consumer experience, but I fear the barriers to entry are far too high. I had high hopes for Simple.com, but they ended up destroying about every useful feature they had and falling way short of the mark...
Yes, I've wanted this for years. I still use Mint but I hate the password part.
There was a clever hack someone posted here a while ago about using the email alerts feature to essentially get a read-only feed of transactions from a bank account. It does require you to parse the email and build your own system, so it wouldn't work for most people.
i did this for personal use a while back, but the biggest issue i faced was that the merchant name in the email alert was truncated, so it wasn't the same level of info quality that mint/plaid can provide (since they have the complete merchant name)
yes, you would think all banks would have or be required to provide a read only user/pass or api to your data, designed for this. This one reason I never used Mint. Great idea, but not providing them with your full account user and password.
Sorry, what I meant was - even if Plaid has username and password, they won't be able to login, at least with BofA, they ask security questions, image identification etc
