Re: Community Discussion: I have to say I'm getting weary of all the download problems

.]On 10/30/24 12:35 AM, David Arnstein wrote:

 > In article <[email protected]>,

 > John Pollard  <[email protected]> wrote:

 >> The only download type (Connection Method) in which the financial
 >> institution is not involved with choosing and formatting the
 >> data to be downloaded, is SOME "Express Web Connect" downloads.
 >> In those specific cases, Intuit does what's called screen scraping
 >> by "reading" the financial institution data as it appears on the
 >> FI's web site.
 >> This is the download type with the greatest risk of sending
 >> incorrect/incomplete data.

 > I hate this practice so much. A web site should be designed
 > and maintained
 > in order to please and serve human visitors - not machines! Changing
 > the web site to improve it is a worthy endeavor.
 > Attempting to automously
 > extract numeric information from a web site is therefore bound to fail
 > occasionally. I fervently hope that none of my FIs sink to this level
 > of stupidity.

I completely agree with your dislike of this practice.

But looking at it from the financial institution's point of view, they 
would likely say it was the financially correct thing for them to do.

Screen-scraping is the cheapest available download method for the 
financial institution - $0.00.

[There are two ways that Express Web Connect (EWC) can work.
- The least reliable is the screen scraping approach - cost free to the 
financial institution.
- The second way is for the financial institution to provide a "back 
door" method for Intuit to get the data - it's basically Web Connect 
(the cheapest reliable Connection Method) provided behind the scenes to 
the Intuit servers - the data from this approach should be as reliable 
as a stand alone Web Connect download. But I do not believe this 
approach is free to the financial institution.]

Financial institutions gain relatively little from offering downloads to 
Quicken. Only a small fraction of the customers of a specific financial 
institution are Quicken users (I believe in the vicinity of 1%).

Normally a business would charge customers extra for services like 
providing, what can be, quite expensive extra services. But the 
financial institutions have not been very successful at charging Quicken 
users for downloads. FI's that have tried have either lost some of their 
Quicken customers, or seen their customers voluntarily choose the 
screen-scraping download option at the same financial institution.

Hopefully the newest Connection Method (Express Web Connect+) will go a 
long way toward providing complete/accurate Quicken downloads at a price 
most financial institutions will find affordable. I believe it's cheaper 
than Direct Connect (the original gold standard Connection Method), but 
potentially just as reliable.

Unfortunately, Quicken does not provide info about which financial 
institutions offer EWC+ (where they do provide that info for Web Connect 
(WC) and Direct Connect (DC); so I can't get a handle on the number of 
FI's that offer EWC+. I'm just assuming (hoping) that EWC+ will be 
increasingly adopted by the financial institutions.

I think the biggest limiting factor for EWC+ is that it currently does 
not provide the ability for Quicken (users) to send bill pay 
instructions to the financial institution. Only Direct Connect can 
currently do that. Hoping this EWC+ limit gets removed.

[There are two ways that Express Web Connect (EWC) can work.
- The least reliable is the screen scraping approach - which is cost 
free to the financial institution.
- The second way is for the financial institution to provide a "back 
door" method for Intuit to get the data - it's basically Web Connect 
(the cheapest reliable Connection Method) provided behind the scenes to 
the Intuit servers - the data from this approach should be as reliable 
as a stand alone Web Connect download. But I do not believe this 
approach is free to the financial institution.]