
Upcoming Changes to Direct Import
Hello YNABers! :)
I hope this announcement finds you safe and healthy!
In the coming days, we’ll be making a few changes to Direct Import. This will impact bank connections for some YNABers, so we wanted to give a quick outline of what’s happening and what’s to be expected.
Quovo, our primary direct import partner, was acquired by an industry-leader, Plaid. Starting this week, some YNABers will see a notification in YNAB asking to update the bank connections. For the most part, this will be like the first time you linked your accounts, and you’ll see an in-app message with some extra (hopefully helpful!) prompts to walk you through it.
We’re hoping to give you some time to make this transition, so your existing connections will continue to import transactions until May 21st. After May 21st, transaction imports will be paused until you update. Once you receive the notification to update, other actions like adding a new connection, and editing an existing connection, will require you to update.
These changes won’t apply to all YNABers, but we wanted to make an announcement about it so you know this is expected and how to reach our support team for help. If you have any trouble with these changes, please fill out the Direct Import form and our team will help you get things on track!
-
Update on international Direct Import, 2021 edition: It's happening and the wheels are in motion. See the new thread for details!
-
I wanted to offer a follow-up to Faness’ post with a few more thoughts on Direct Import that aren't quite as immediate. I’m going to try and divide this into three parts.
- The first will be quick, just a reflection on YNABers who hit errors in importing.
- The second will be a bit more on our future plans in this area.
- And the third, for those who are interested in details and analogies, will offer a bit of a deeper dive.
Part One
This is the most important thing: For anyone who has trouble with imports, I hear your frustration. Whether that’s because you’re a loyal customer (true) or because I first-hand have trouble with my own primary account (also true), I get it. We want every experience in YNAB to be better than you imagine, and transaction import isn’t always that. End of story.
Part Two
On the second point, we’re working on improving that experience. Since we launched import at the beginning of 2016, we have integrated with four partners for transaction aggregation. The most recent of these is industry-leader Plaid, and we’re seeing good results there. Not perfect (more on that below), but Plaid has not become a leader in this field for nothing. We never set out to have four partners, but we’re always trying to improve our performance and your experience.
Who we partner with (and, not to keep teasing section three, but why we partner is also discussed below), of course, is only part of the equation. It’s what we do with the data in YNAB that counts, too. To that end, we’ve been working on importing and displaying pending transactions. We brought this feature to beta once before, realized it wasn’t as good as we wanted it to be, and have revised that work. I’m looking at the beta in my own account now, and it’s a huge asset to the experience of using import. I hope you’ll feel the same when you see it soon. (One note: not all financial institutions give us access to pending transactions, so this experience may not be uniform for all YNAB users.)
Looking further down the road, we’re also working on smaller items, like improvements to matching and payee cleansing, to a larger look at bigger picture questions about how to manage ALL THE DATA in a 21st-century financial life. I’m also proud that YNAB continues to offer and support three separate entry methods for transactions—because different ones work better for different people, and because of the redundancy it provides. We’re committed to supporting that.
Part Three
Here’s some of the nitty gritty, framed as responses to questions. Nothing here takes away from Part One above—this is just an attempt to dive into the realities behind transaction import.
Why can’t import just work? All the time, every time?
Great question. I'll give you my analogy for transaction aggregation. It's like a photocopy machine. Amazing tech (at least when first invented!) but a million moving parts with extreme sensitivity. So, when you bought a copy machine years ago, you also bought a service contract. It was going to break, it would just be a question of when.
Moving from photocopiers to banks: In the US banking system (unlike the EU, for example), there are essentially zero standards for data formatting and consumer access. So, if you want to aggregate data from 15k financial institutions, you essentially need to build 15k integrations. Any change that any one of those banks can make breaks one of those integrations, and they typically don’t tell you ahead of time. That’s going to be customer-facing immediately. Also, many of those banks aren’t equipped to handle the volume of requests that are enabled by aggregators. It’s like everyone logging into their accounts 3-4 times a day, and they just weren’t built for that.
Why can’t I trigger an import whenever I want to?
It feels like you should be able to, right? But this goes back to the point at the end of the previous question. If, instead of our aggregation partners pulling transaction data a set number of times per day, everyone could request the data over and over again, this situation of banks being overloaded with requests would get worse, and the experience may be worse for all.
Now, that’s not to say that this won’t be possible down the road. Financial institutions and aggregators are improving these systems over time, and it’s possible that “on demand” will be a part of the future YNAB experience.
Why does YNAB partner with others? Why not just build your own?
The answer is above: It’s infinitely complex to manage all those integrations, and the value of doing so only comes when you are at scale. YNAB would just never be big enough to do it, and we wouldn’t be an education company, a software company anymore.
Mint and Quicken seem to “just work”—what about that?
Intuit, unlike YNAB, IS big enough to “roll their own”. My sense is that it works well, though we’ve also had YNABers tell us that their bank works well on YNAB and never did there. In any event, Intuit stopped providing their aggregation tech to third parties in 2016, so we don’t have an opportunity to use it.
Why no direct import outside the US and Canada?
When we first launched Direct Import, we had some support for connections outside the US and Canada—but not for long, as our only partner (at that time) pulled it shortly after launch. Since then, our focus has been on making the US & Canadian connections we do have better, while at the same time the EU in particular has been revising banking regulations. Those revisions mean some US-based aggregators are pursuing European (and other) connections. Like on-demand refresh, this may mean it’s possible this will be a future part of the YNAB experience (and it is for some users now through the unaffiliated Sync For YNAB).
-
Thank you for the informed update. I’m curious how the transition to the new import method will affect older transactions. More specifically if the reestablishment of the Connection with my bank causes it to be considered a new connection, what happens to my older transactions? Will YNAB be able to establish which transactions are the same as they were before the reconnection? Apologies if I’m not being clear. I’m concerned with duplications or at worse, data loss. I’m sure you all are doing your best with testing. But curious regardless. Thanks
-
Todd said:
When we first launched Direct Import, we had some support for connections outside the US and Canada—but not for long, as our only partner (at that time) pulled it shortly after launch. Since then, our focus has been on making the US & Canadian connections we do have better, while at the same time the EU in particular has been revising banking regulations. Those revisions mean some US-based aggregators are pursuing European (and other) connections. Like on-demand refresh, this may mean it’s possible this will be a future part of the YNAB experience (and it is for some users now through the unaffiliated Sync For YNAB).So are we getting direct import in EU or not?
The EU is quite frankly the most stable, standardized & mature environment you could find (for a market of this size at least). It would probably be easier even to offer direct import here than the U.S.
And quite honestly, a lot of us in Europe are getting quite exhausted with paying the same price as the US customers, but getting less features. And the continuous "its being evaluated" feedback doesn't help it go down easier either. Its been evaluated for years now. So, is it finally coming? If so, when? Because its getting very tiresome YNAB. The price is simply too high for a product that doesn't get developed beyond superficial improvements like sign-in with Apple and pastel color schemes. We want real, meaningful features & improvements to be rolled out. That is what the SaaS scheme is supposed to deliver after all. That is what you promised when you took this route, so lets see the results please.
-
Todd said:
make my transactions available more quickly.Todd From your perspective, why is this important?
-
I am an early ynab adopter... Here are my observations from the many years in perspective
1) import is way better than it used to be (if I can manage to connect to my bank, which at the moment I can't. Grrr). I almost never see duplicates. Matching works reasonably well. I almost always can just hit Reconcile and boom! Perfect.
2) If people are trying to compare Mint and Quicken to yNAB well, they're using it wrong! It is a computer program that imports transactions from the bank but the similarity stops there. yNAB is unique and i rely on it every day to know how much money is available. Tracking expenses after the fact? Not so useful to me.
Honestly I'd be lost without ynab.
I'd love to see ynab interface with Google calendar. I schedule my payments on the calendar. I can imagine some nice ways to integrate those 2 tools!
-
Since the switch over to using Plaid, my downloaded transactions are attributing activity to the wrong accounts at the same institution. For example, the downloaded transaction will indicate a payment made from my mortgage account instead of checking account. Any advice on how to correct this? Thanks!!
-
This Plaid announcement also matches up with my Charles Schwab US connection no longer connecting after having had no issues for a very long time. I didn’t get a notification asking me to update my connection. It just quit working. It says there is a known widespread issue with this bank in the connection interface but this bank isn’t mentioned at all on the YNAB Status page. The website connects fine in the interface hyperlink website.
-
I updated all my accounts on Friday, and then it seemed to take forever for the next import to come through. usually, if you hover over the little check mark next to the account name, it tells you when the last time it was updated. Generally (before the update) it would never be much more than 8 hours. Or if I had just logged in, it might say longer, but the login would trigger an update (maybe, I'm assuming here, because it happened fairly frequently) and everything would be available fairly quickly.
Well, Nothing got updated yesterday, and today, one of my accounts had some new transactions to import, but several are saying "2 days" or 11 hours. One of them says "1 hour ago", but I have no idea why that one, and none of the others updated. Anyway, since there isn't a way to "trigger" an update, I'm a little less than impressed with the availability of my imports.
-
I have Capital One accounts and a Discover account. I had to relink often before the update, but they worked. After the update, I have to relink, then it will go two or more days with no import, and then I have to reverify again, but it often fails. I have been locked out of my Discover online access twice because of failed attempts for the direct import to connect. This morning I unlinked my accounts, much easier to just import the qfx file daily. This update was definitely not an improvement for me.
-
I'm finding the direct import process to be MUCH slower than before the update. Wells Fargo is now asking for two-step ID, which it did not do before (I don't know if this is a change at Wells or prompted by Plaid). To make matters worse, it is asking for it twice, perhaps because I have both a checking account and a savings account linked? I have always had two-step ID with Capital One, but it accepted and imported much faster before. Plus, it now asks for my creds twice even though I only have one account. All in all, I am very disappointed in how much more time it takes to import...
-
I just want to report that my issues were resolved after I opened a case (reported a Bank Importing Issue) and YNAB support worked with me to change import partners. Plaid wasn't working for me, I was going 3 days without updates, then getting prompted to reconnect my accounts, having to authenticate via 2FA twice, etc. They moved my accounts (I have CapitalOne and Navy Federal) to the import partner MX, and everything is working like it used to work, before switching to Plaid.
-
As a former Mvelopes user, I disagree you cannot grab data on command, as Mvelopes does EXACTLY that, and you can actually pull pending transactions.
I get that Finicity is the developer of Mvelopes, so perhaps they have a feature they do not offer companies (or competitors, in the case of YNAB), but it can be done.
-
@faness I did not discover this post from you until I was impacted a month after your migration into another provider. I would suggest in the future for user-impacting changes like this, YNAB should communicate via email, and a banner in the main page of YNAB.com after you login. This has been a frustructrinag experience for me as I raised 2-3 support tickets on this issue and none of the YNAB staff have responded to any of m,y tickets.
I like the work you guys do but do please work on improving the communication channels to reach to your impacted users. a Forum announcement is not acceptable at all.
-
Not sure if this is related but YNAB import has been extremely unstable ( at least that's when i started noticing it) since the migration. I just got this error yesterday that all of my CHASE imports are failing:
Connection Tips
There is currently a widespread issue with Chase, so if you're having trouble connecting please know we're already on the case! -- For business accounts, each card with a unique number may need to be added as a separate account. For investment accounts, choose Chase Investments from the list of financial institutions. For Amazon credit cards through Chase, please try linking to 'Amazon.com Chase Cards' instead.
-
Direct Import doesn't seem to be winning YNAB many admirers.
In Europe we have to pay a subscription fee to YNAB which includes D.I. but they don't supply the service paid for! "no international providers" apparently. Absolute tosh!!
In Europe can however pay a 3rd party, syncforynab who deliver a fantastic service which works brilliantly - just have to reauthorise access every 90 days to comply with open banking regulations.
In the US &Canada you seem to have access to the service but it doesn't work very well.
I'm just so disappointed. @YNAB is the best budgeting tool but I no longer go out of my way to recommend it because of the companys approach to this issue.
Not happy at all