Correct. Like Mint did, they use the Intuit aggregator. Fwiw, I’ve used other platforms that rely on Plaid and have had far more issues than I’ve ever had with Yodlee. Same with MX, another of the aggregators. Ultimately, the solution is multiple aggegators, which the Tiller folks have indicated they are moving toward.
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That sucks about Plaid - do they have issues with institution connections for months on end? My experience with Yodlee has been pretty bad so admittedly I’m grasping for better.
Truth is that I think there’s a lot of luck involved. There are thousands of financial institutions in this country. Each of us uses a unique and very small subset of those institutions. I would bet that however many customers Tiller has no two of them use the exact same combination of institutions. Some of us will have better luck with Yodlee (or Plaid or MX or Intuit) than others.
For me, when I tried one of Tiller’s competitors that uses Plaid and MX, I could never get my mortgage transactions working correctly, and I could only get my 529 accounts to work occasionally (and unpredictably). Knock on wood, all of my accounts work on Tiller and, for the most part, they have pretty consistently worked since I started using it last November. But to my point: there’s a pretty good chance that we use entirely different financial institutions.
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Thanks @dmetiller you’re totally right about the issues with these smaller institutions and it being hit or miss no matter what aggregator is being used.
These connections break primarily because many aggregators still use screen scraping to pull the data from the institution and therefore any website layout, infrastructure, or security login requirement change can break the connection for any aggregator that uses screen scraping.
Some aggregators may be more responsive than others at fixing these smaller connections (re-working the scraping after the bank makes a change to their site), but our experience with Yodlee has been that while they have connections built for 12k+ U.S. banks they’re really focused on making sure the top 300 that make up 95% of their refresh volume are working well.
As more and more institutions move to API based connections, like “open banking,” the connections will become more reliable and stable.
Until the United States enforces some type of regulation to require financial institutions to use an open banking connection many of these smaller banks have no incentive (or budget) to transition.
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Sorry if this it not the best thread for this question – I searched and didn’t see any updates anywhere else.
What’s the latest with the multi-aggregator beta? Is this still open (I just filled out the form), and how are things looking so far? Is this close to being made publicly available?
Mostly asking because it’s frustrating seeing a growing number of my account connections – and large ones like Ally and Vanguard – becoming less stable, and looking forward to (hopefully) seeing an improved experience w/ the multi-aggregator.
Thanks!
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Hi @jader201 we understand the frustration in unreliable data feeds. We are still testing multiple data aggregators and there is currently no timeline on when we might offer additional aggregators as a non-beta option.
Hi,
I would suggest that Tiller gets a timeline for multiple aggregrators quickly and get this implemented! Right now Tiller Money is utterly useless to me and I surmise many others are in the same boat. You may be losing current and future customers because the vast syncing issues. I used Tiller for essential real-time information on my money situation and was forced to go to other bank syncing sources because I don’t have the luxury of taking my time (like Tiller seems to ) on getting my financial house in order… Sometimes I wonder if you will be able to make the necessary changes to fix syncing.
Is the beta program even up and running with any beta users? If not, it should be.
It seems like Tiller is unable to move quickly on this, so in the interim, would it be possible to write effective and mostly foolproof scripts for adding manual entries via bank exports?
I really think Tiller Money is a great product and I have supported you for many years, but you are letting me down.
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I have the same comments you have about the aggregator change, is it really working better ? Theyre is no news from Tiller ! it is a major issue for Canadians.
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Thanks for your feedback here @jemmoa7. Some users have beta access to the additional aggregators we’re testing, but we didn’t open it broadly to the “Beta” group because it’s not going to work well for some of those customers (those with Canadian institutions). We also are wanting feedback on the connections for smaller institutions because most of the time the connection with larger institutions works well with Yodlee.
I know there are exceptions and we see outages for bigger institutions, but many of those are moving to open banking rapidly and Yodlee’s connections for open banking sites generally work really well.
I’m sorry to hear we’re letting you down. We are working on some tooling for importing bank exports, but until that’s ready for testing your best bet is to use the Tiller Community Solutions CSV Importer, which has a basic bank option you can use. Docs: Import CSV Line Items
As far as where we are with the beta we are evaluating the reliability of connections from those aggregators. The tricky (and complicated, very big lift) part of building this is how to handle duplicates in a situation where someone wants to connect an institution via another aggregator because it’s not working well with the primary. This would mean re-adding from scratch and would create duplicated instances of the accounts and likely some overlap of transactions. Getting the experience right with that is key so you’re not left cleaning up duplicates. But there are a lot of “What if” scenarios we have to think through carefully and building all that is a pretty big effort.
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Thanks for the detailed reply. It sounds more and more that Canada is going to be forgotten by Tiller. That’s unfortunate, but I guess we’re not a profitable customer base. I’ve enjoyed my time with Tiller but it seems more and more to utilize it to the fullest, you have to be a customer with only American banks, and major banks at that. I think my financial journey with bank syncing (and possibly Tiller) is almost at an end. I’ll be looking for better manual import tools from you in the near future.
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Hi @jemmoa7,
I certainly do empathize with your frustration and situation. I don’t know if you saw the other thread related to Canadian banking. There is an interesting link about the need for Open Banking in Canada. There are also posts from other users impacted and some responses for Heather and others that might provide additional insight to the current state of aggregation. It doesn’t provide the immediate solution you require but does provide additional context.
Help with Canadian banks-what is the status of new providers
Clint
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This is certainly not our intention, but because we rely on 3rd party data aggregators (and are not going to get into the business of building aggregations ourselves) we are totally at the mercy of the aggregators on the terrible Canadian institution connections.
I completely respect your decision if you decide to move on from Tiller due to our lack of support for Canadian institutions right now, and we’ll definitely be sorry to lose you if that’s really the case.
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Hi,
Thanks for responding. Don’t get me wrong, Tiller has been very beneficial to my financial life. It was because of Tiller that I am now fairly proficient in Google Sheets! I’ve gotten many ideas for my budget process by working with Tiller sheets, so Tiller still has value to me.
I am now looking at the best ways to manually import data. I’ll check out the Tiller option for this.
I’ve been modifying the Tiller Template for manual data entry. So far so good. I’ve retained the ability to switch back to bank syncing when conditions improve. I am glad to hear that you are working on an improved manual import. Can’t wait to try it. Also, thanks for the link to the Pocketsmith article. It was very enlightening. I understand more what Tiller is dealing with regarding Canadian banks.
Jim
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Thank you Clint.C for the links. I’m understanding the issues better now.
J
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We look forward to your feedback @jemmoa7 !
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I was told that the beta group is full. Apparently the new aggregators support the accounts I am missing with Yodlee. Is there any news on when additional aggregators will be available for the non-beta users?
I joined the Beta group when it was announced but maybe I never graduated from waitlist to actual group, as it hasn’t even reached everyone who signed up as yet. Might be quite some time to general release.
We don’t have an update on when we’ll be sharing it with additional users and are focusing our initiatives right now on one of the options and experimenting with that one being the new default for new users only. Once we have that in place we’ll be sharing access to it more openly with existing users who cannot connect at all via Yodlee.
We don’t want to share it for broad use yet because we don’t have any automated duplicate cleanup workflows so if you already have an account connected via Yodlee and re-connect it with the new one you’d end up with duplicated accounts and probably some duplicate transactions.
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Ideally, though, a user should be able to select which aggregator to use for each account (e.g. yodlee for this bank, something else for that, based on what works best), thus rendering deduplication generally unnecessary, especially beyond the ‘new’ setup phase.
Thanks for this feedback.
While I understand the logic behind this, knowing our customers it will still be necessary. None of these aggregators is perfect with any connection, and I know that as soon as the connection drops for one, some customers will jump right to connecting it with a different aggregator to see if its working there and thus end up with duplicates.