How we’re supporting and troubleshooting your bank feeds as we enter 2023

News & Announcements
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As we shared in our 2023 update in the Community recently, bank feeds are a top priority this year. In addition to the engineering work underway at Tiller and Yodlee, we also want to improve how we’re communicating with each of you when you need help with your bank feeds. We currently have two support paths depending on the institution.

High and low volume

High volume institutions (previously called full support) make up most of the volume of data Yodlee aggregates from banks. Yodlee often has direct APIs for data with many of these banks, and is also working to move more of these institutions to open banking. If you have an issue with a high volume institution we may not need as much help from you because it’s likely others have already submitted the information needed to troubleshoot and/or Yodlee has a close relationship with the institution.

Low volume institutions (previously called limited support) reflect the long tail of banks that Yodlee supports. Like high volume institutions, all but a tiny fraction are working well on any given day. That said, if you are having an issue, we often require more help to troubleshoot in order to give Yodlee the information they need. This can look like several repetitive back and forths asking you to try the same steps or asking you to jump on a troubleshooting call with Yodlee to do a screen sharing session of the bank’s site directly.

Any institution that requires two factor authentication (2FA), or a code sent via email or text message, will require your active participation in the troubleshooting process. Yodlee can’t validate the changes they’ve made have worked because they are blocked by the 2FA step.

Resolution times

Issues for low volume institutions can take longer to resolve because Yodlee may not have an active relationship with the bank or bank APIs may not exist to facilitate Yodlee’s work. Delays in resolving issues for high volume institutions also happen when banks update their technology or refresh their websites. Even with a strong institution relationship when big changes are made and multiple teams are involved, resolutions can take a little longer.

USAA is a case in point - and a frustrating one for those of us with accounts. On a positive note, Yodlee has recently confirmed they have signed an agreement with USAA to build an open banking connection for USAA, which will offer the most reliable, robust, and secure connection to USAA.

The “high volume” and “low volume” labels are new, and we hope they better communicate that we may need more of your troubleshooting help with low volume sites. You can read more on our help center here.

Regardless of low or high volume, our goal is to make sure you’re supported with feeds from all of your banks and we’ll keep working toward that goal.

We’d love your feedback. Chime in with your reply below.

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That is great to hear about USAA. Almost all of my accounts are USAA accounts, so this tool has been useless to me for months now. Thank you for working on this as hard as you have had and continuing to communicate.

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Venmo connection is a mess. I was able to pull transactions a few times, but it’s been months since I get anything (even with a manual refresh and texted code).

I’m considering dropping the connection and manually reclassifying the bank withdrawals, but that reduces visibility to which methods I’m spending money through.

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Heather,

Can you share a link to the list so that I can know which of my institutions are in each group? I’ve been looking to stop using one institution that I’m pretty sure is on the “Naughty” list, but want to confirm that its successor is on the “Nice” list before proceeding.

Thanks,
Michael

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Appreciate the update, and I’m assuming it can’t change now, but labeling it from “full” and “limited” support to “high” and “low” volume is a bit misleading in the sense that it’s still full or limited support just with indirect terms.
I’m assuming it’s high vs low volume because, as you explained, of how much data Yodlee gets from those banks vs overall, and that’s how you want to described it. And it make sense for those who have read through these documentations . But for those seeing a problem for the first time and then searching around it’s not as obvious.
But otherwise the clarity and reasons behind why some bank issues take longer to resolve is appreciated.

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Heather,

Just wanted to reach out and say thank you for this email. I’ve got a few USAA accounts and appreciate your updates. Thanks for the great service!

Andrew Breen

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Hi @michaelrwolfseattle we can’t share a list publicly, but you can feel free to write to our support team and they’ll let you know whether it’s high or low volume.

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Thanks for your feedback here. Our initial language was confusing to some people. We revised it to better reflect that these institutions are supported, but the support experience when troubleshooting will be different.

The “full” vs “limited” really doesn’t express the reality of that, and some people thought we were saying their limited support institutions just weren’t really supported at all.

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:wave: welcome, @grmatt! We’re hoping the Venmo connection will be working better soon too. I was just talking with our technical account manager at Yodlee about this and re-escalated all our existing open requests with Venmo to him.

I should probably have also noted in this post that any institution that requires a second factor security code (2FA) will require your active participation in the troubleshooting process. Yodlee can’t validate that the fix has worked unless you try because they can’t get past the 2FA step. Venmo falls into that category so I recommend just keep trying to refresh it.

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Heather, is CiT Bank (not to be confused with Citi Bank) on Tiller’s list of banks with feed issues? This particular bank hasn’t worked for 2+ years on the Tiller platform.

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I have to echo that, John; I love this tool, but it was not worth the money without a USAA connection. Glad this is moving toward resolution!

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Just wanted to add my voice to the chorus thanking you for working to fix the USAA connection. I deeply appreciate the transparency you all give us into the resolution process and I know it can’t be easy or quick to work these types of things (particularly when parts of the process are outside of your control altogether) so I am really grateful for your efforts it getting these account data streams up and flowing again. Looking forward to when I don’t have to manually (with varying degrees of automation) input my USAA transactions anymore!! : )

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Thanks for concentrating on getting the connections to work better. Are you planning on adding additional integrators in 2023 and not just relying on Yodlee?

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Heather,

Oh… I get it.

Hey… here’s a sneaky game…
Maybe TILLER could point to a YODLEE page that doesn’t exactly say it, but would do the trick if Tiller customers read between the lines. YODLEE could call it a “compliance matrix” or a “feature table” or a “status page”.

And… if anyone asks you…
Michael did NOT suggest that Tiller implement a policy where you could tell your customers:
And… if anyone asks you…
Tiller didn’t tell you XYZ Credit Union was on the B-list.

:wink:

Thanks,
Michael

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I recently left USAA because of their constantly breaking feeds (and also their interest rates are well below market). Maybe we can have a dashboard of institutions rated based on the relative stability of their feeds?

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When evaluating Tiller, I would very much have preferred to just not have been offered the option to connect to low volume institutions, period. Either that or have them display with a giant, flashing, red disclaimer warning “These are unsupported by our provider, should be considered unreliable, and may disappear on a moment’s notice, never to return.”

Between mid-October and today I’ve lost access to one provider per month, which despite the best (and much appreciated) efforts of the Tiller team, have not been restored (additionally my primary bank broke for about 2 weeks, but did get restored). So now I’m in the position of deciding whether to just give up and manage them manually, just stop tracking them entirely and simply monitor the statements, or wait a potentially indeterminate amount of time until they’re fixed. And then there’s the consideration of, if I keep managing them manually, then they start working again, what kind of data cleanup (e.g. duplicate transactions) am I going to have to do?

Personally, I would rather have just not set up any of those accounts in the first place, than go through my Quicken PTSD of watching my accounts start failing one after another. There’s still value (to me) in managing my high-volume accounts (my bank and my daily-expense credit cards), and then I can figure out some other solution for my lower volume accounts, like investments, FSA spending, store credit cards, retirement accounts, etc.

My expectation now is that I may very well lose any and all connectivity to any account on a moment’s notice and just have it be gone for good. Having the resolution be “we don’t know how long this will take to resolve, if it ever even gets resolved” might as well be “we don’t support this account” and would be clearer in managing expectations. To me, that would at least create a perception that the service, for those accounts that are supported, will be reliable. I don’t know the difference between high and low volume accounts, so from this user’s perspective, they’re all (potentially) brittle. Even the institution alerts spreadsheet doesn’t differentiate high vs. low volume. For accounts where I have a choice (unfortunately not the case for all my accounts), I would even consider changing banks just to use one that has a higher degree of support.

That said, I really like Tiller’s solution. I love the spreadsheet design. I love the community add-ins. The support team is incredibly responsive. I want this to be my long-term solution, because I’m not going back to Quicken, Mint, Personal Capital, GnuCash, Moneydance, YNAB, etc. (yes, I’ve tried them all). It’s either Tiller or I start with a blank spreadsheet and give up on bank feeds entirely. So I’m going to be cheering you on and offering to support troubleshooting the data feeds any way I can, because I dread doing everything by hand.

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@jemmoa7 it is something we’ll be considering, but no firm commitment on that for this year yet, though long term that is the goal.

@dave, definitely an interesting idea! Possibly something we can offer in the future, but currently we don’t have that information in a publicly consumable format.

@sfergus1 thanks for your feedback here. This new language is intended to correct this perception. This is not at all what we want to communicate and doesn’t reflect reality now that we’ve studied the resolution times/data for high/low volume sites. Additionally, we’ve worked closely with a new technical account manager at yodlee to understand the expectations around high volume/low volume site resolutions from their perspective. Generally high volume site issues are resolved faster, but only a little faster than those of low volume sites. It’s only in rare cases that they can’t solve a low volume site issue, and usually it’s a tiny or very obscure institution. All in all I’m glad to hear you’re loving Tiller though!

@michaelrwolfseattle, this information just isn’t available publicly anywhere…

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I love my Tiller and appreciate all you do for us!

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Welcome, @mary.mcconnel :wave: thanks for your kind words :slight_smile: glad you’re loving Tiller!

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Fearless honesty here. Thanks for having the conversation, and thanks even more for having it in public. This is the kind of product evolution I want from an “Open Banking” platform!

… says the guy who was in Open Source back when it was called Free Software – “Free as in Freedom. Free as in Beer.”

:wink:

Many times, I’ve mentioned that “Check” is not a useful description field for an on line bill payment. Especially since I already pre-populated the payer informatioon (and memo) when I authorized that transaction. But… after many years, all I get from my credit union is “Check”. That makes it impossible to auto-categorize!

The “invisible hand” is at work.
Customers: If you ignore them, they WILL go away!

RE: Metrics

Metrics are very difficult to get in most industries. As a young industry, software development is behind most industries. Tiller sits in the middle of finances (lots of data) and software (not so much…). We are used to getting prime interest rates to 5 significant digits any time we want to get them, but trying to measure software quality or system resiliance is a very difficult.

That being said, some folks have moved the practice into the 21st century… specifically the “DevOps Research & Assesment” has been publishing scientific studies and have repeatedly found 4 numbers to be excellent predictors of “elite” teams

Through six years of research, the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has identified four key metrics that indicate the performance of a software development team:

Deployment Frequency—How often an organization successfully releases to production
Lead Time for Changes—The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production
Change Failure Rate—The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production
Time to Restore Service—How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production

Dina Graves Portman. (2020, September 22). Use Four Keys metrics like change failure rate to measure your DevOps performance. Retrieved January 25, 2023, from Google Cloud Blog website: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-four-keys-to-measure-your-devops-performance

Gone are the days of annual or quarterly software releases, or hours (days? weeks?) of down time. I’ll bet that Open Banking will start to create “information radiators” of these 4 metrics.

If you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it.

BTW… DORA, in keeping with their own continual improvement ethic, noticed a new trend and added a 5th metric in this year’s report – Reliability.

Times, they are a changin’.

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