J.P. Morgan, Intuit to Give Website Users Wider Access to Bank Data -- Update
January 25 2017 - 9:53AM
Dow Jones News
By Emily Glazer and Peter Rudegeair
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Intuit Inc. have ended a long
standoff with a new agreement to let the bank's customers check
account information on the technology firm's sites without sharing
their Chase passwords.
The nation's largest bank struck the deal with the owner of
Mint.com, TurboTax Online and QuickBooks Online in an effort to
ease tension with operators of increasingly popular
personal-finance websites and applications, the companies said.
The New York bank disclosed details about the new partnership
Wednesday morning. Under terms of the agreement, J.P. Morgan and
the Intuit sites will work together without requiring bank
consumers to share their passwords more broadly than J.P. Morgan
Chase recommends.
The issue of whether bank customers should share their passwords
with outside companies that aggregate financial data erupted in
late 2015, when big banks including J.P. Morgan, Bank of America
Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. temporarily limited the flow of
information to some websites including Intuit's.
Under this week's agreement, a few million affected J.P. Morgan
Chase customers will be able to authorize the bank to
electronically share their financial information with Intuit's
financial-management sites, which include consumer destinations
Mint and TurboTax and small-business site QuickBooks. In the past,
such customers had to manually enter their Chase passwords into the
sites.
Many banks said the old arrangement could compromise
cybersecurity and overload bank websites at busy times when the
aggregator sites would request updated information about consumer
accounts from bank servers.
Now, "customers will get to decide what they want to share and
when they want to share it -- without having to hand over their
password," said J.P. Morgan Chief James Dimon in a statement.
H. Tayloe Stansbury, technology chief at Mountain View,
Calif.-based Intuit, said the new deal would give customers more
real-time access to their data and would enable them to make better
financial decisions.
The bank will begin to roll this out to new Mint customers in
the first half of 2017.
J.P. Morgan Chase customers who want to do business with Intuit
will be authorized to download their bank-account data through a
bank-provided token that doesn't involve the handover of login
details, said Gordon Smith, the bank's head of consumer and
community banking.
Data will be shared via an application-programming interface, or
API, which the companies say is more efficient and secure than the
previous method. Bank customers will see their information in the
Intuit applications and can turn access on and off. Intuit also
agrees it won't sell customer data to third parties, which has been
a concern of banks including J.P. Morgan.
J.P. Morgan Chase and Intuit said they will pursue similar
agreements with other companies. In June, Wells Fargo & Co.
announced a similar partnership with small business accounting firm
Xero where customers don't have to share their bank passwords and
will be directed to a secure Wells Fargo server where they can
share certain account information. The bank then said it would like
to use the partnership as a blueprint for dealings with other more
widely used sites.
While bilateral agreements between two big companies are a good
first step, there will ultimately need to be more industrywide
standards for data-sharing that include smaller banks and startups,
says Beth Brockland, a managing director at the Center for
Financial Services Innovation, an industry group.
J.P. Morgan's Mr. Dimon wrote in his annual shareholder letter
in April that the bank analyzed many of the contracts third parties
use and found more information is taken than the third party needs
to do its job.
"When we all readily click 'I agree' online or on our mobile
devices, allowing third-party access to our bank accounts and
financial information, it is fairly clear that most of us have no
idea what we are agreeing to," he wrote.
Write to Emily Glazer at emily.glazer@wsj.com and Peter
Rudegeair at Peter.Rudegeair@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 25, 2017 09:38 ET (14:38 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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