For around 6 months, my credit union stopped syncing transactions and balances. A couple of weeks ago, balances started syncing, but transactions are still not syncing. Tiller support keeps encouraging me to refresh. The reality behind the scenes is that Tiller made a deal with Yodlee to get data. Yodlee makes deals with individual banks to get data syncing. Tiller is not upfront about this at all. It would be preferable if Tiller could just be upfront that they are a Yodlee add-on rather than pretend they are in control of the system. Telling customers to ârefresh and try againâ is not helpful. Tiller should be honest with customers.
Search the forum, itâs common knowledge and often shared that Tiller currently gets its data via Yodlee. I donât think itâs a matter of âhonestyâ. Itâs generally not necessary to share with a customer what systems are involved. Doubt youâll see HP telling their customers they canât deliver your computer because Microsoft Azure is down.
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I guess the real issue is that for 6 months I get support telling me to âtry refreshing nowâ when in reality nothing has changed. To use your analogy, it would be like HP telling customers âcheck your mailbox now for a package!â when nothing has been shippedâŚ
Most of the time, Yodlee is able to fix issues with feeds from specific banks.
When there is an outage, banks with large user volumes receive significantly more attention during outages than do smaller banks (like credit unions 
)
My personal credit union worked well for a number of years until they stopped making their service accessible to Yodlee. I switched to a bank that was compatible with Tiller. 
(My other institutions are all working great.)
Iâm sorry to hear that one of your institutions has stopped syncing, @blobber.
Yes, same problem for me. However, it seems too extreme to me to let Yodlee dictate who to bank with. I instead choose to be the squeaky wheel rather than change banks due to a minor software integration issue with Tiller+Yodlee.
Iâd suggest that maybe Tiller should find a workaround for when Yodlee is not working. e.g. Tiller should make their own data aggregation software for banks that Yodlee is not working well with, since Tiller is the one charging a fee to customers for displaying the data. That is what good startups do: find solutions to customer problems rather than force them to change their behavior.
We hope to offer additional connections to other data aggregators in the future, but weâre unlikely to ever build our own aggregation service.
If you have an ongoing service request open with our data provider for the issue with your credit union the back and forth asking you to refresh over and over is expected behavior for a low volume site like that.
You can read more about the differences between high and low volume sites and the troubleshooting expectations here:
That makes sense.
This is the part I take issue with. This is not âexpected behaviorâ. Maybe for you, but not for me, and I am the customer. Hereâs an idea, make a Dominoâs pizza style status indicator for faulty Tiller/Yodlee bank connections. Goes from âYodlee is not working with this credit union â Yodlee has integrated â 2FA integration through Tiller server â data loading in Tiller server â data showing in customer feed â ticket completeâ or something. Whatever the actual steps are to integrating a particular bank. That way at least your customers that canât see their data at least have some idea of what is going on. Right now I have heard the same âtry refreshingâ for 6 months so as much as Iâm sure thatâs expected behavior for you, to me it feels like you are jerking me around. Short of actually solving the problem, if you at least provided some indication of progress it would be a lot more bearable. Thatâs what Dominoâs pizza does with pizza deliveries.
Thanks so much for your feedback. I like that Dominios progress indicator idea, we just donât have any insight at all into what is happening on Yodleeâs side. We just get an email from them saying âweâve made a changeâ have the user try again. And thatâs when we ask you to try refreshing again.
Sorry that itâs taking forever, I definitely understand your frustration.
hereâs an idea. You could make a google sheet that has as each row a different bank, and each column a status. Statuses could include: Working, and then if not, go through the dominos pizza thing of:
Tiller aware of issue => Yodlee aware of issue => technical error => 2FA working => balance syncing => transaction syncing or maybe some other statuses that you can think of.
Hi @blobber - we sort of have that with our institution outage dashboard.
Beyond that weâre hoping to improve the error reporting and capabilities both within our application as well as some new features that Yodlee enabled for âFastlinkâ the UI you use to re-enter credentials on the Tiller Console or in the gSheets add-on.
The credit union that has been having issues, that we have been discussing for months, isnât on that list, and so I wasnât sure if you kept it up to date or not.
Hopefully the new features make things more transparent for customers.
Hi @blobber the outage dashboard shows institutions with widespread issues. When there is a widespread issue it is already being worked on we wonât escalate those any further since in most cases once the outage is resolved the error clears up for all the users that had issues.
Itâs likely that the credit union connection error youâre having is isolated to only your connection - in which case we can escalate those issues to our data provider for troubleshooting (where youâre being asked to test if their changes have fixed the connection or not.)
Translation of your comment for english speakers: the Tiller outage dashboard is not complete, and sometimes (randomly) Tiller decides not to put institutions that are having connection issues on the dashboard.
Hi @blobber this is also not true.
Global Site Alerts generated by Yodlee, that we receive via email and scrape to get added to that spreadsheet, only get added if they affect a minimum number of customers and we do not control that minimum, that is on Yodlee, our data provider.
There is a difference between âoutageâ and âconnection issue/errorâ - outage is going to affect most people at the institution and there need to be many of their customers writing in about it and often for smaller low volume institutions these sites arenât going to be added to the outage list because there just arenât enough customers/reports.
Yodlee supports over 20K institutions, we couldnât possible add manual outages for every single institution a customer reports is not working and sometimes itâs unique to that personâs accounts because of the type of accounts they have or some other site variation.
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Great question. There are databases such as SQL that can easily store millions of records. You can easily build a simple query and filter function into a web service to keep track of your outages. This is a beginner-level backend developer project. If youâd like me to help with this, please let me know.
This is an interesting dialogue 
My bank (Baxter Credit Union) stopped working and it does happen to be on the âInstitutions Alertâ list as of 03/17. So, if my low volume credit union is not a good choice, what is? Do you have a list of banks with reliable connections? Needless to say, a reliable connection to my financial institution is like #1 on my priority list.
I am trying to move away from Simplifi. It has been nearly flawless at connecting with my bank, though. Yodlee makes it hard to switch.
ya, itâs weird that Tiller lists some random institutions on the âInstitutions Alertâ list. I like your idea of including all working and non-working institutions on the same list. Hereâs my proposal: what about also including their percent reliability? Like: 5 stars = no problems, 4 stars = 80%-99%, 3 stars = 40-80%, 2 stars is 1-39%, and 1 star is nobody is able to connect⌠that way all institutions are scored on teh same metric. Maybe also a metric for volume through Tiller. Like: 1 bar is 0-100 clients, 2 bars is 100-10,000 and 3 bars is 10k plus or somehting. So each institution can be easily seen to be either working reliably or not, or just low volume.
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@CFields The most reliable connections that we know of are those of open banking institutions.
We hope to continue improving our reporting and data around which institutions are performing best, but we donât store that information right now in a way thatâs digestible and usable so @blobber itâs not as simple as youâd think. The outage alerts being ârandomâ is dictated by Yodlee, not us. We donât get to decide what they post a site alert for, nor do we fully understand all the rules for what appears there when and when it gets updated. Iâm making educated guesses based on my experience and the cryptic details theyâve shared with us on this matter.
Baxter CU is a lower volume site but it likely has more volume than your CU and thus more of Yodleeâs customers reporting issues with high failure rates.
There is some threshold for when something gets added, but they havenât disclosed to us the exact criteria.