Yodlee Account Aggregation and Fidelity Full View

Published 9/27/07 (Modified 3/9/11)
By MoneyBlueBook

Over the years, I've accumulated an assortment of bank accounts and investment brokerages that store my money, and a wide array of credit cards that handle my transactions. I also have this money saving habit of signing up for every frequent flyer, hotel, and shopping reward portal options available to me. With so many accounts, I found it cumbersome and difficult to keep track of all of my account login and password variations.

Thankfully, someone had the ingenuity and brilliance to create a tool to manage this mess. To organizing my finances and accounts, my preferred tool is Yodlee (very cool name). It's a popular online account aggregation tool that allows users to combine all of their bank, investment, loans, bills, and even reward accounts in one place. You give them all of your logins and passwords to your financial accounts, and it logs into all the sites for you. It lists all of your assets and liabilities, and computes your net worth. In the end you have a real-time view of all your balances and recent transactions, all neatly on one page. Yodlee offers its aggregation service through its own website, but I found their original version to be rather ugly and disorganized. Ironically, you're better off using a Yodlee powered version through another company.

Fidelity Investment Full View

You can access Yodlee's technology through its clients and partners. I currently receive my Yodlee powered account aggregation service through Fidelity Investments' Full View and I find it convenient since most of my investments also reside with Fidelity. The service is excellent, allowing me to see all of my account balances in one place, everything from my Sallie Mae student loans, to my Citibank accounts, to my accrued Northwest Airlines and TripRewards program balances.

The variations of Yodlee's program all operate essentially the same, whether it be: Fidelity's FullView, Bank of America's My Portfolio, Wachovia's OneStop, or HSBC's EasyView. Regardless of whichever version of Yodlee you use, there's no denying that it's an indispensable real time tool. There are alternatives, but with Yodlee, you are not only getting a well built free service, but also a tool that is available anywhere online. Hop to it!