Big steps forward for more reliable bank connections

[heather]

Today we’re excited to share three updates that move us meaningfully forward on our commitment to rock-solid bank feeds.

Plaid is now available for everyone as a second aggregator.

Until now, most Tiller customers were able to connect their banks only through Yodlee, our first data aggregation partner. For most people, Yodlee is still the right path. It works great for a lot of institutions, especially large banks with open banking support. But we’ve always known that a single aggregator does not provide the redundancy necessary to offer robust and reliable connections to all your institutions.

That changes today. If you’ve had a persistent connection problem with a specific bank via Yodlee, you can now try it using Plaid instead and see if it holds up better. Both aggregators are available, and you choose what works best for your situation.

To be clear: if your connections are working well, you don’t need to do anything. We recommend leaving things as-is unless you have a specific bank that’s been a problem. This is a tool for when you need it, not a required migration.

The Add Accounts button on the Tiller Console now offers everyone the option to connect via a backup data partner. Please note that at this time we do not have support for loan types other than student loans via Plaid. If you need to connect a mortgage or another loan type, Yodlee is your best option.

We built a Data Cleanup tool to make switching cleaner.

If you do decide to move a connection from one aggregator to the other, you’ll end up with duplicate accounts and possibly duplicate transactions in your sheet as part of the transition. The new Data Cleanup workflow for Direct Fills Google Sheets handles that. It helps you clean up the duplicates and merge your balance history from the old connection to the new one without the tedious manual steps.

If you haven’t upgraded to Direct Fills yet, check out the guide, and if you want guidance on using the tool to switch connections you can get that here.

If you’re using Microsoft Excel, you can use the manual steps documented here to deduplicate accounts and we hope to offer the Data Cleanup tool for Excel workbooks in the future.

The Data Cleanup tool also helps you clean up unwanted data from your spreadsheet when you unlink an account or completely delete a connection. Read more about how it works here.

But it doesn’t stop there.

We believe Yodlee is a strong contender in the aggregation space, and we want to make sure it’s on a level playing field with Plaid. So we recently completed a significant rewrite of our Yodlee integration and we’ve already seen it resolve connection issues for customers who had been dealing with persistent problems. It also enables us to move more quickly as we work toward making progress on highly requested features.

Let us know what you think

We’ve wanted to offer a second aggregator for years. It’s real work to add a new data partner while maintaining the reliability and integration depth that Tiller runs on. We’re glad it’s finally here.

Share feedback in the comments below and if you run into issues or have questions about whether changing the aggregator for a connection makes sense for you, reach out to our support team via chat on the Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com.

[kentratke]

You guys seriously rock

[kevandcan]

This is timely. I have had problems now for 14 days with one of my accounts and Tiller isn’t super helpful if the data isn’t there to analyze regularly. I’ll check it out.

[zoemeanslife]

Heather noted here that, “We encourage you to change only if a connection has persistent connection issues.”

I wonder whether there may be a description in the new article or somewhere else appropriate as to what constitutes a connection issue, i.e. is it solely if the connection repeatedly fails to refresh the balance and/or pull in new transactions?

As an example, I have an account that stopped auto-updating and I must manually refresh it, which is very likely a configuration on the institution’s end and not likely to improve by switching aggregators, but I don’t know that for sure, and some users may not know it at all, without it being documented.

[heather]

That’s a great question @zoemeanslife - I would say if it’s a subpar experience, try Plaid. Just use the steps to first add the connection and test it out for a week either linked to a separate spreadsheet or not linked to a sheet at all and just see how the refreshes work before deciding to commit to linking it to your main sheet and using the Data Cleanup workflow. And if it doesn’t work better, just delete the connection so it’s not cluttering up your Console unnecessarily.

[pete.selent]

I have one bank that recently went through a complete online banking overhaul, including a new web address to login with. Consequently, yodlee can’t connect now as it has not updated its url to the new login page for my bank. I started a ticket regarding this with Yodlee and they said it could take weeks to correct. I will try to connect via Plaid today, but was wondering if I should delete the account in yodlee before adding it in Plaid?

[pjbanman]

Hello Tiller,
I have had problems in the past with my bank using Yodlee, Plaid seems to have fixed the problem.
However, the description of transaction is not as clean, any ideas on how to fix this?

[ryan12]

Does this change anything with banking in Canada?

[Clint.C]

@pete.selent Hi Pete, if your bank connection was working just fine before the overhaul, I would recommend waiting for the url update. I went through the same type of situation with my credit union. Once the url update was implemented the transactions picked right up and continued to work smoothly. I would assume that Plaid will also need to update the url to your bank too. However, sometimes the required changes are more than a url change. Your bank may have changed their interface layout that Yodlee or Plaid would use. That type of change could take more time to update by Yodlee and Plaid. I don’t recommend deleting your bank account in Tiller as you don’t want to lose that historical record within Tiller (it will remain in your spreadsheet). You can test out Plaid in a separate Tiller template as Heather mentions in her comment in this thread just above your post.

[Clint.C]

@pjbanman Hi Phil, I’m not exactly clear what you mean by “clean” and how it is impacting you. Are you just asking if Plaid can clean up the description information they provide to be more like Yodlee? Plaid should be providing the same transaction description details, although they may include additional information or format the data a little differently than Yodlee did.

[Clint.C]

@ryan12 I do not believe it changes anything for banking in Canada per Heathers comments on the following post linked here.

[heather]

@pjbanman

description of transaction is not as clean, any ideas on how to fix this?

I’m glad Plaid seems to be more reliable for you. There isn’t a way to really “fix” it @pjbanman - we can’t control how the description data comes across from the aggregator. I’d recommend using an AutoCat rule to clean up the descriptions.

@ryan12 it’s not specifically intended to improve the connections to Canadian institutions, but you may find that some work better with Plaid than they do with Yodlee. We don’t expect to see improvements until the open banking regulations take affect and the institutions start building their APIs. I think @jemmoa7 probably has the most experience that I know of with testing out whether Plaid is better for any Canadian institutions that don’t work well with Yodlee.

@pete.selent

I will try to connect via Plaid today, but was wondering if I should delete the account in yodlee before adding it in Plaid?

@pete.selent I don’t recommend deleting the yodlee connection. Just try with Plaid and monitor in a separate test sheet or monitor the connection via the Console if you are able to get it connected. If it’s more stable, then you can use this guide to help you transition.

[jemmoa7]

Yes, I do have a lot of Canadian bank experience with most of the integrators! Plaid is by far the better choice for linking Canadian institutions. From what can gather, Plaid actually has agreements with Canadian banks (as does Mx) Also, Plaid is faster at fixing connections than Yodlee ever was for Canadian banks. Since Tiller won’t support us Canadians and our banks, I had to get a Banktivity account. Since they use Plaid, and are a pretty good Envelope budget app, if Plaid dies on me, I have Banktivity support help to fix it, and that will fix the Tiller side as well. I’m hoping that when Consumer Driven Banking comes into play in Canada, (hopefully by the end of this year), I will be able to stick with only Tiller again. I had a breakthrough with AI and was able to manually port my entire Envelope budget to a Tiller Excel Spreadsheet. It would have taken me YEARS to learn the coding to do this. For what it’s worth, for the first time in many months, Tiller syncing is working for all of my banks!

[andrei]

Is this the place where I report a bug with Plaid? I tried to connect to Leader Bank (mortgage) and got the message in the screenshot attached.

[heather]

hi @andrei - we don’t have support for loan types other than Student Loans via Plaid at this time.

Plaid’s product offering is quite different than Yodlee’s and we’re still trying to determine whether it makes sense to implement Plaid’s “Liabilities” product. It doesn’t look like they have a Transactions feed for loans via that product so we may only be able to get the balance, which isn’t the full picture like we have with Yodlee.

Also, they don’t officially support other loan types such as auto loans, personal loans, or anything other than mortgage and student loans so if one of those ends up not working well or getting pulled we can’t escalate a ticket to them about it.

[andrei]

Appreciate the answer. Thanks!