As many of our customers know, we have this great service called Direct Access. It allows customers to download  transactions automatically if their bank doesn’t support the OFX (aka Direct Connect) protocol. Needless to say, this service has been very popular amongst our customers. I personally use it for most of my accounts.

Unfortunately, as many of our customers also know, Direct Access has been behaving quite poorly recently. It started with occasional sluggishness on the weekends. Then we began to find that a user might experience a timeout error on almost any update. As soon as we started to hear about the first errors we began investigating. Unfortunately, troubleshooting a live, production server isn’t always easy. We tried tweaking many settings and over the course of the degraded service period, we doubled the server’s capacity, confident that such a move would resolve the issue. Nope, the errors still kept happening. During this time we were also working with our backend connectivity provider to see if the issue was on their servers. After some great troubleshooting sessions, we finally narrowed it down to some of the code on our server. Once we finally got a better scope of the issue, our Direct Access server engineers implemented a fix and we got it deployed.

Now I’m happy to say, as of this morning (Thursday, May 8) Direct Access is faster than it has ever been. With our code fix and improved server capacity, downloads are happening much, much faster.

I want to give an apology to the people that experienced poor performance, and as a way of saying “thanks for your patience,” we are giving every Direct Access user’s account an additional 30 free days of the service.

-Ian

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16 comments on “Direct Access: a fix and more

  • It still seems painfully sluggish to me, as slow as it has ever been. But at least it did eventually work. The delay seems to occur in the “verifying credentials” stage but after that the actual download of data is swift. Why does verification take so long, when the manual logging on at almost any bank’s internet banking service is much much quicker? It’s way quicker than typing in all the transaction by hand, however, which is what I keep reminding myself every time I start to get frustrated by the delay!

  • The difference is night and day for me, up to last week it would take several minutes to download, now its a matter of seconds. Great fix !

  • I’ve been using DA for a while now and it’s really very good, although occasionally slow. However today I’ve run into a problem. I’m in the process of increasing my password security and have gone from a 15 digit alphanumeric password to a 20 digit, illegible, alphanumeric password using 1Password to generate it.

    After updating the passwords on my internet banking (www.nab.com.au – NAB, National Australia Bank) and ensuring the logins worked I then ‘disconnected’ my accounts from Direct Access and then attempted to ‘reconnect’ them (as there is no way to simply change the login credentials (an oversight?). Anyway, when attempting to log in to ‘find accounts’ it comes back with a login error (incorrect credentials) and the code ‘402’. The credentials are correct as I can log into my internet banking on the website using them but for some reason DA fails.

    Is this a problem with my password length?? Help would be greatly appreciated.

  • OK, so shortening the password doesn’t work either. The exact error text is:
    “Incorrect login credentials (402)”

    The problem is that they’re NOT incorrect… :-/

  • I think I’ve worked out a solution. Simply taking an account ‘offline’ and then reconnecting it doesn’t work. I found that I had to go into File>Manage Direct Access… and delete every single entry there and start again. That seems to have fixed it. Surely simply taking it ‘offline’ should clear the entries in the ‘Manage Direct Access’ area? Anyway, just in case anyone else is having the same issue…

    • Thanks for working out this solution. Two years later, it worked for me. I hope IGG is reading this, and can address this bug.

  • Any way to recommend banks that are in smaller european countries? I love ibank and it would be so much sweeter with the DA enabled!

  • Problem seems to be with National Bank. I had same “Incorrect login credentials (402)” issue with National Bank of Canada. It was working for a few months and then the problem occurs again. Any solution?

  • I’m totally new to Banktivity and setting up today for the first time. I keep getting exactly the same 402 error code when attempting to set up HSBC UK. It just won’t connect. I am not sure if it is something to do with this particular bank giving options of connecting with and without a secure key. I tried both and nothing will work, including the suggestion above. I won’t be able to make the switch without this as it’s too critical for me. Any suggestions?

  • Ian, I have been using iBank for Mac (now Banktivity) for several years and been quite happy. Now it seems that many institutions are dropping direct connect capability, which leaves only option to be Direct Access. Your website states that “This service has a small fee”. $39/year, IMHO is hardly small Any chance we can see the price of this service be reduced to say $20/year or somewhere in that range?

  • Request noted. I am not going to publicly comment about what we may or may not do with pricing. Thanks for the feedback!

  • All I know is that when I try to set up an account with Direct Access I get the following error message: “The file “directaccess.catalog” doesn’t exist.” I cannot find an answer to this problem anywhere. This is very frustrating.

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