4 ms·

Why don't banks implement read-only passwords?

• jcdavis 11y ago
  Wells Fargo has this via "guest users". I have a read-only user that mint uses
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• dragonwriter 11y ago
  1. Some do. 2. Some are trying to provide their own convenience systems as a competitive advantage over other banks, and to create costs for people switching out from them to a different bank. Supporting any method of aggregation where the bank becomes a dumb store of a money is disadvantageous to that strategy.
• mmebane 11y ago
  USAA does, but it's not implemented as simply as app passwords. There are two major issues with aggregators: 1) authentication and 2) data access mechanism. A read-only app password would solve #1, but aggregators commonly implement #2 by screen-scraping, which is the bane of everyone's existence. I wouldn't be surprised if half of the reason BoA cut off aggregator access was because most of the aggregators were screen-scraping, and BoA got tired of the support calls whenever they made a site change and people's accounts stopped syncing. Last I heard (um, a couple of years ago), USAA's solution was a proper API, but Mint was still screen-scraping. I have no idea if that's because Mint is lazy or USAA'S API is too limited for what they want, but my money would be on the former.