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OFX is not a replacement for Yodlee. OFX is a passive specification that relies on each data provider writing to the spec. Yodlee uses OFX, but also uses screen

OFX is not a replacement for Yodlee. OFX is a passive specification that relies on each data provider writing to the spec. Yodlee uses OFX, but also uses screen scraping and other methods to get data from the many sources not covered by OFX. If Mint dropped Yodlee, many of their data feeds would disappear. Data aggregation is a messy business. No two companies have the same feed options, nor do any two feeds work the same. And for consumer-facing data, Yodlee is the best.

stuff4ben 17y ago
Spoken like someone who has done time in the trenches. I've been there, done that, and it truly is a messy business.
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  Yes, I hear you. I worked at a start-up doing insurance quotations on the web... horrible mess of backend stuff to connect to the insurers. The best ones had a responsive XML based interface over HTTPS, others just told us their algorithm for insurance quotes (which we then had to maintain), others gave us a buggy Visual Basic application that was never meant to be the backend for anything. Nightmare to link it all together and make it look like the consumer was getting real time quotes from different vendors.
papa 17y ago
I spent a couple of years at Yodlee. Your comment is spot-on. Not only are there huge headaches around creating the scripts/feeds to grab the data, but once you have the data there's a significant challenge of normalizing it so that you have some sort of data consistency. And then you have the issue of constantly having to update the scripts as financial institutions make (often undocumented and unannounced) changes to their data. The Abobe:Youtube / Yodlee:Mint analogy in the article isn't entirely apt since Yodlee effectively provides not only the technology but the content upon which Mint is built. I'd agree with those who say that Mint's position is tenuous from a business perspective b/c of this (and maybe this is why they opted to make their exit). But I certainly can't take away from the fact that Mint built a fantastic product that blows away any other front-end implementations of this sort.
- Flemlord 17y ago
  I can only assume that Mint has an iron-clad contract with Yodlee. However, it wouldn't surprise me if Intuit doesn't fully appreciate the importance of having non-OFX data in Mint. They had another data feed product targeted at investment advisers that was killed due to problems with data management. Article: http://www.fa-mag.com/fa-news/2683.html http://www.fa-mag.com/fa-news/2683.html

stuff4ben 17y ago

Spoken like someone who has done time in the trenches. I've been there, done that, and it truly is a messy business.

jgrahamc 17y ago
Yes, I hear you. I worked at a start-up doing insurance quotations on the web... horrible mess of backend stuff to connect to the insurers. The best ones had a responsive XML based interface over HTTPS, others just told us their algorithm for insurance quotes (which we then had to maintain), others gave us a buggy Visual Basic application that was never meant to be the backend for anything. Nightmare to link it all together and make it look like the consumer was getting real time quotes from different vendors.

papa 17y ago

I spent a couple of years at Yodlee. Your comment is spot-on. Not only are there huge headaches around creating the scripts/feeds to grab the data, but once you have the data there's a significant challenge of normalizing it so that you have some sort of data consistency. And then you have the issue of constantly having to update the scripts as financial institutions make (often undocumented and unannounced) changes to their data. The Abobe:Youtube / Yodlee:Mint analogy in the article isn't entirely apt since Yodlee effectively provides not only the technology but the content upon which Mint is built. I'd agree with those who say that Mint's position is tenuous from a business perspective b/c of this (and maybe this is why they opted to make their exit). But I certainly can't take away from the fact that Mint built a fantastic product that blows away any other front-end implementations of this sort.

Flemlord 17y ago
I can only assume that Mint has an iron-clad contract with Yodlee. However, it wouldn't surprise me if Intuit doesn't fully appreciate the importance of having non-OFX data in Mint. They had another data feed product targeted at investment advisers that was killed due to problems with data management. Article: http://www.fa-mag.com/fa-news/2683.html http://www.fa-mag.com/fa-news/2683.html