Mobile banking login
Scratching below the surface of "Scrapegators," aka aggregators, who scrape internet banking to feed other fintech applications. Consequently, customers use these third-party financial apps instead of credit union or bank sites.
That is an important revelation cited by Austin, Texas-based Malauzai Software, a provider of mobile and internet solutions for community financial institutions, in its January 2018 Monkey Insights. The research highlights key trends in internet and mobile banking usage based on January's data for 400-plus credit unions and banks covering almost 17 million logins from 895,000 active internet and mobile banking users.
"The bottom line is that consumers are choosing to use third party applications, not their internet banking sites. 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/members. They must find ways to align interests with the fIntechs, this is the real opportunity," Robb Gaynor, Malauzai's chief product officer, who reviewed the Malauzai's monthly data to determine the trends that financial institutions would find beneficial and interesting.
Key findings include:
- Eight percent of internet banking logins are scraping sessions. The range goes as high as 25% for one particular credit union studied. "What does that really mean? It means that consumers are not finding the feature in internet banking and they are finding it in a fintech vendor. The financial institutions are at some level failing to meet the needs of their consumers."
- Balances and transaction history equal 90% of activity. The most popular screen to scrape is the balance screen. Next, is the transaction history, or really recent transaction history as not many scrapegator sessions go deeper than a single screen of transactions. Very few try to transfer money or pay a bill, the focus is elsewhere, on the data.
- Ninety-three percent of end-users also use internet banking. Most of the people who use the scrapegators also log into usual mobile and internet banking. They receive some utility from a third-party fintech app, but need to return to the bank or credit unions digital offering to perform core transactions and get expanded data. But some, the 7%-10%, never go to their bank's/credit union's website. "They have moved away and are getting more value from someone else."
- Mint, Yodlee and Intuit are "The Big Three" scrapegators. There are dozens of scrapegators accessing internet banking. Mint is the only top vendor who has its own fintech app, all of the other scrapegators are truly aggregators, in that they are scraping and passing data on to another fintech vendor. Other notables in this list include Plaid, Finicity and Finovera.
- Transaction failure rates are high, 5%-7%. The study noted scripts the scrapegators build break. Then they can't scrape anymore. "We can tell when a script fails. Approximately 5%-7%% of all inquiries fail because of basic reasons like the screens have changed or sessions have timed out." For credit unions and other financial institutions with flexible Internet sites, this is a problem as it is easy for them to change, and change they do, thus breaking the scripts. "Yes, some aggregators use APIs to access data but this is a vast minimum of the data they represent, so the focus is scraping."
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Roy Urrico
Roy W. Urrico specializes in articles about financial technology and services for Credit Union Times, as well as ghostwriting, copywriting, and case studies. Also: writer/editor of a semi-annual newsletter for Association for Financial Technology since 1997 and history projects funded by the U.S Interior Department, National Park Service and Warren County (N.Y.).
