Have you ever had a company ask for your financial records to be able to better advise you on ways to increase your net worth? This can be a hassle gathering them from multiple locations and providing them to the consultant then updating them regularly. One of our clients decided that they wanted to simplify this process by finding a way to collect and display the transaction data from a user’s accounts neatly in one place. The solution we came to was Yodlee Envestnet integration.
There were four primary steps we needed to perform to achieve this goal:
- Integrate the client’s systems with Yodlee.
- Update the registration experience to create a Yodlee Account
- Update UI/UX to allow users to change connections to Yodlee
- Display information gathered in an easily understood format.
Integrate Client’s Systems
The most important piece of streamlining the business process was integrating the client’s current system to Yodlee. Yodlee offers a variety of ways to integrate with your system, but we chose to use the API as there is already an approved to solution for the integration we needed.
Update the Registration Process
To encourage implementation, the registration process needs to be streamlined so upon registration the user either connects an existing Yodlee account or we autogenerate a new Yodlee user account and store credentials in our database. After the new Yodlee user Account is stored, the user needs to connect their existing financial accounts to Yodlee Envestnet by signing into their accounts and granting Yodlee permission to access the information and share it with us.
Update the UI/UX to allow Changing Connections.
On the User Profile page, a “Register”/ “Un-Register” button was added to make changes to access of the Yodlee account. This allows the user to make changes to the connection if they wish to change Yodlee accounts.
Display Information
This is the step that makes the integration most useful. Once all the functional changes are made, we used the financial transaction data for several purposes:
- An aggregate list of financial transactions.
- A summary widget.
- Future Development: Incorporate the data into the financial advice algorithms.
Aggregate List of Financial Transactions
Creating an aggregate list of financial transactions allows the user of our client’s service to see all their financial information in one place and allows them to filter it to focus on certain areas if they desire. As you can see from the example screen below, transaction dates, accounts, merchants, category, and amount spent are all readily viewable.
Summary Widget
The data is used in a widget that displays account balances, goals, recommendations, risk activity and other information. This makes it really easy to understand where the accounts stand and what opportunities are available to improve their scenario based on goals.
Future Development
This integration will eventually be used to help generate better solutions, but will require changes to the algorithms to integrate the real time information. An example I could see being of great use is the analysis of whether reducing debt or increasing investments make more sense based on trending returns compared to interest rates paid on debt.
As you can see the Yodlee Envestnet Integration helps our client gather information quicker than asking their customers to gather all their information and provide it for input and analysis. Reach out to us at team@flyingdonkey.com.au if you have any questions.
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