News

Third-party financial apps 'drive a wedge' between FIs, account holders, study warns

March 1, 2018

Malauzai Software, a provider of mobile and internet solutions for community financial institutions, has released its Monkey Insights trend report on internet and mobile banking use based on January data for more than 400 banks and credit unions.

The data includes 16.9 million logins from 895,000 active internet and mobile banking users, a company press release said.

The report focuses on "scrapegators," also known as aggregators — vendors who scrape internet banking to feed data to other fintech applications.

Findings include:

• Scraping sessions account for 8 percent of internet banking logins.
• Queries into balances and transaction history comprise 90 percent of activity.
• The great majority (93 percent) of end users also use internet banking.
• Mint, Yodlee and Intuit are "The Big Three" scrapegators.
• Transaction failure rates are high; 5–7 percent.

"The bottom line is that consumers are choosing to use third-party applications, not their internet banking sites," Malauzai Chief Product Officer Robb Gaynor said in the release. "This trend is highly significant given the advent of the movement towards open financial API's; everyone's talking about it.

"Banks and credit unions better get a handle on this trend or it will continue to drive a wedge between them and their customers [and] members. They must find ways to align interests with the fintechs, this is the real opportunity."