As a part of our ongoing commitment to improving our bank data feeds we’ve just released a new feature that allows you to rate your bank connections on the Tiller Console.
We’ve been working hard to enable other bank data aggregators over the last year or so. We’ve shared access to them with our beta group and some new customers to collect feedback and test. This intentional vetting and testing process helps us decide if they are a good long term fit for our goal to help every customer get all their transactions and balances reliably and efficiently into their spreadsheets.
These ratings will allow us to aggregate qualitative data about an institution on a per aggregator basis for our new aggregators as well as our original aggregator, Yodlee.
For each institution you have connected you can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to indicate the connection’s data and refresh quality. This is a completely subjective rating so give your gut level reaction. You can rate an institution more than once, and the more the better. Each time you refresh the Console page the rating will reset.
We encourage you to give a rating after each manual refresh or each day when you check in on your transactions and balances. If you notice issues with the data quality, such as duplicates or incorrect data for an account at that institution, give it a negative rating. Institution won’t refresh, or it’s on the outage dashboard? Give a negative rating. If things are working well and as expected, give a thumbs up! Rate however you’d like, the choice is yours.
Soon you’ll also see a 1-5 rating scale satisfaction survey pop up on the Tiller Console. Please use this as a way to indicate your overall satisfaction with Tiller getting all your balances and transactions into your spreadsheet. This survey gives us a pulse on your high level satisfaction with Tiller’s core value promise around bank data automation.
These two qualitative measures, along with quantitative measures from logging connection health statistics, will allow us to make crucial decisions on how we can continue improving the bank connection and overall experience for our customers, including enabling broader access to our new aggregators.
Let us know if you have any questions or feedback about this new rating feature or the survey. If you need help with a specific institution connection, please as always, reach out to our support team via the chat window in the lower right corner of the Console at https://my.tiller.com/.
This is great – thank you for the continuous focus on improvement! I especially like the option to provide overall feedback with the 1 to 5 rating.
A text input box to provide some context on the reason for the overall rating as this is such a potentially wide ranging set of topics (e.g. browser hanging, cross feed/multiple account common issues, etc).
Just in case others have the same issue - at Apple Federal Credit Union, their credit card service must be being provided by another vendor. All my bank accounts’ feeds are perfect. However, the credit card feed hasn’t worked for six months, and their credit card department says it’s a Tiller problem. So I rated the whole institution’s feed negatively, but it’s really only one part of it.
FYI - Compared to my 9 or 10 other connections, I have one - National Bank of Arizona - that takes forever to validate and then save… but it seems to work minutes later.
Thank you for the update and all the work you’ve put into testing and improving aggregator performance. I appreciate the transparency and the opportunity to contribute feedback on connection quality.
That said, I do have one concern. I’ve noticed some aggregators tend to keep their connections open for extended periods, and from a security perspective, that feels like a potential risk. I’d be more comfortable if there were clearer boundaries around connection duration or more transparency on how long connections remain active.
Looking forward to seeing how this evolves and appreciate all your efforts to improve the platform.
I appreciate the efforts you are making to the quality and reliability of the data syncs, but I’m afraid you’re missing a significant part of the issue that leads to as much dissatisfaction as the data quality itself.
Not having timely data is almost as bad as not having data at all.
Perhaps I missed an announcement, but the frequency and schedule of my data downloads has been significantly reduced since I started using Tiller. Back then (almost 2 years ago) I was pleased to see that every weekday morning when I went to check my financial positions, I was greeted with updated balances and usually fresh transactions. Nothing was more than 24 hours old. It was delightful.
Today - it’s hit or miss at best. If I don’t manually refresh my institutions I could be 2 days, 1 day, 12 hours, 1 week? It’s all over the place. I have no visibility into what the schedule is, if there’s a problem, a Yodlee limitation (all my institutions are Yodlee), a limitation with my instituion, or something else. Is manually syncing my institutions a first-world problem? Of course, all of this is. I just wish I had a better understanding, or expectation, of what data frequency I should be seeing in the Summer of 2025 with Tiller.
Perhaps your next enhancement could provide visibility into the refresh cycle? Perhaps you could offer subscribers to ability to choose “windows” to have their data refreshed? Perhaps a standing “overnight” window based on location/country? Anything to help us better set our expectations and not have to suffer the disappointment of seeing aged data in the morning and having to manually refresh our accounts. Oh the horror! (/sarcasm).
I’d recommend reaching out to our support team via the chat window in the lower right corner of the Console at https://my.tiller.com/
@jeffh0821 thanks so much for your feedback about the timeliness of refreshes and how that’s changed since you’ve been with Tiller. Definitely something for us to consider as we continue making improvements.
@msmiller there is a text box where you can add more context on the 1-5 rating
@bbruck thanks for the feedback and extra context about that one institution credit card issue, makes sense to rate the whole thing negatively.
Gathering this data is a good move. Do you have an update on adding another aggregator service? Personally I have seen yodlee performance decrease and with my renewal coming up shortly I need to see better performance to justify continuing. I am now seeing multiple institutions, shown as working in your list, that are continually returning ‘technical error at undefined’.
I’m excited to hear more about the alternate aggregator. One element I personally care about is data privacy. Tiller has a good policy:
We aggregate your data and similar data from other users into larger sets of anonymous personal financial data. This aggregated information does not identify particular users or otherwise allow anyone to recover sensitive information about individual users.
Additionally, Envestnet | Yodlee supports de-identified data analytics and insights for institutional investors and investment research providers so they can better manage investments on behalf of their customers. The de-identified transaction data…
I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as “de-identified transaction data.” No two people have exactly the same spending habits, so having transaction-level data can identify someone. There are services out there that exist entirely for re-identification, i.e. you hand them an “anonymized” data set and they try to marry it with data from other sources to associate specific names / identities with the data.
It would be nice if, when Tiller is negotiating with data aggregators, they require the aggregator to offer at least the same level of privacy Tiller does.
Thanks for always trying to make this software better and better. I couldn’t function without my current workflow thanks to Tiller! I think this is a super useful feature for end users to feel like they are contributing to actually helping the product they use continuously improve.
Edit
I think it would be useful to also be able to leave a comment in addition to a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. Would allow for more granular analysis and end user input - for example:
My connection to Bluevine backing has been mostly ok, however there were a couple months of no connection, so just a generic thumbs up or thumbs down might be a little lacking … On the other hand, my connection to Schwab has always been great…however it doesn’t track total account value, just cash value (meaning no positions) -I understand that it’s an unrelated topic, but I REALLY hope that we can also get the investment tracking feature someday soon too.
Anyway, please keep up the good work, and thanks again.
Thank you for providing the rating system. The transparency is good for everyone. Once you move to the 5 point scale you can get better assessments. I agree with the earlier comment that an open comment section would be good to learn key recurring issues.
@ptr0 thanks for calling this out. We are contractually opted out of Yodlee selling our customers’ data because of our strong stance on privacy. Looks like @foobar is clued in
@tbolish thanks for your suggestion on being able to leave a comment. I also had originally intended we’d offer a way to share more feedback for a specific negative rating, but the UX was starting to get complicated
We hear you on Venmo being terrible
@chris.oneill619 the 5 point scale is a separate survey that pops up in the Console independently. We’ve collected enough responses from our active customers to get the signal we needed with that, but may open the survey back up again after making additional improvements to see how it changes.
I have a connection that keeps giving me an error when I try to connect so I can’t get to the thumbs up/down option. Not sure how to report it. I have two credit cards through Comenity bank, and both won’t let me connect at all. Dell and Caesar’s rewards.
I get a “Technical Error at etc….” then to contact the tiller team.
