Monday, May 3, 2010

Additional Comments on Yodlee

I was going to write some more of my own comments about Yodlee. It seems that Peter Hazlehurst (Senior Vice President at Yodlee) had left a comment on my previous post about Yodlee, but that comment has since been deleted. Nevertheless, Yodlee's customer service has been mostly responsive to my concerns. They have corrected the problems that I had experienced with my Bank of America and Chase accounts. However, a new problem has cropped up with one of my banks: Discover Bank. My account balance will update, if I manually update Yodlee. But the DiscoverBank balance doesn't update automatically, like all my other accounts. I sent a service request to Yodlee Customer Care a couple of months ago, but the problem has yet to be resolved.

My accounts that were previously unsupported by Yodlee are still unsupported. For example, my 401(k) account at JP Morgan remains unsupported. In my previous post, I mentioned something called Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) that JP Morgan uses. Some readers are probably not familiar with his technology, so I'll summarize it here. If I try to access my JPMorgan account from a new computer, their website will not recognize me even if I entered the correct username and password. Then their website will prompt me to choose to receive an "Activation Code" via my home phone, text message, or Email message. I then have to enter that code into the website for them to recognize my computer and grant access to my account information. This registration has to be done once for each computer that you use to access your account. It appears that Yodlee doesn't support this JP Morgan account registration system.

However, I also have several Chase bank accounts that use a similar MFA system, and they seem to work fine in Yodlee. Remember that both JP Morgan and Chase are all part of one big company: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM). So, I'm thoroughly confused as to why Yoddle would support one but not the other.

Lastly, one reader has asked me how to track stocks on Yodlee that are not held in a brokerage account. For example, one could hold 200 shares of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) in certificate form. I know that you can setup a manual account on Yodlee where you can put in an estimate of the value of your stocks, but I haven't figured out how to have that updated automatically. Such a feature would also be useful to track the value of gold or silver bullion that one holds in a safety deposit box.

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PFS

2 comments:

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