Continuing Investments in Direct Access

I’m happy to be writing to you today with some news about Banktivity’s most popular feature, Direct Access. For those unfamiliar with “Direct Access” – it is the name of our technology that allows you to connect to your bank and automatically download transactions.

As many of you know, we partner with backend providers to make Direct Access work. The backend providers handle authentication with your bank and getting the data, and Banktivity handles all of the other components. For a long time, our only provider was Yodlee. In 2022, we added Salt Edge as another provider for banks in the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Today, I’m happy to announce that we are offering another provider for our customers in the United States – Plaid.

The banks Plaid supports overlap considerably with many of the banks supported by Yodlee. We are introducing Plaid so that our customers can pick the aggregator that works best for their specific banks.

Data Aggregation and Potential Problems

I do want to talk briefly about data aggregation. In short, it can be a very nasty technology. While many banks have moved to Open Banking, which generally results in better connections and higher quality, many banks still rely on older technologies, like screen scraping. Additionally, sometimes aggregators need special permission to connect to banks, and the site will fail if an agreement can’t be worked out. If you have used any personal finance app with automatic transaction downloads for a good amount of time, you’ve almost certainly experienced some kind of connection issue. I’m not promising that Plaid will solve every connection issue, but having more options is good for our customers.

Should you move your connections to Plaid?

If your connections are working now, you will not want to move – don’t fix what isn’t broken. However, if you have some accounts that you’ve never connected or are failing regularly, you should consider connecting via Plaid. Please note that each account can have one and only one connection, either Yodlee, Salt Edge (for non-US customers), or Plaid. Before you can try to connect an account to Plaid, you’ll need to disable the existing connection. On Mac, this involves selecting the Account, then going to Account > Show Connection Status…> Options [Button] > Disconnect [Button]

The Disconnect sheet on Mac to disable a Direct Access connection.

Enable Direct Access Beta Sites

At the time of this writing, we still consider Plaid connections BETA. Suppose you want to try out a Plaid connection. In that case, you’ll need to enable access to beta sites by going to Banktivity > Settings > Advanced and then clicking the “Enable Direct Access sites under development” checkbox.

Enable access to Direct Access sites under development in the Settings window. On iOS, this is done through the Settings app.

Set Up a New Connection

Once the beta sites are enabled and you have an account that has no connection, you can then proceed to set up a new connection. On Mac, select the account, and from the top menu, choose Account > Setup Automatic Download. In the sheet that comes down, search for your bank and continue forward. If Plaid supports your bank, you will see it listed as a connection option:

A bank showing the Plaid option (outlined in red and in beta at time of writing this).

Conclusions

Easily getting your financial transactions into Banktivity is one of its pillar features. When this works, everyone is happy. When bank connections fail, frustration levels, understandably, grow pretty quickly. We are introducing Plaid so that customers have another option to connect to their bank. So far, the results of switching from Yodlee to Plaid have been very promising.

I also want to point out that we are rolling out this major feature without any giant update. Now that we are on subscription, we will typically release features as they are done and save the big updates for when we make larger changes to our codebase that span many subcomponents and potentially destabilize the system.

If you are one of the customers who has been struggling with a bank connection, I hope Plaid supports your bank and provides a better experience.

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Ian Gillespie

CEO/Founder at IGG Software, Inc.

A California native, Ian's academic background was in biology, botany and environmental studies. He comes to the field of technology purely out of personal passion, and has been writing Mac software for over a decade. He's also an avid birdwatcher, a soccer player, fiddler and an organic gardener. He lives in Oregon with his wife and their two sons.

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