Originally published by Business Insider
- Wells Fargo will enable customers to share financial data with third parties via Envestnet | Yodlee's platform.
- This move will help the bank take advantage of pandemic-driven use of financial wellness apps.
Customers of the major bank will be able to share their financial data via an API with over 1,400 third-party financial applications that use the Envestnet | Yodlee Financial Data Aggregation Platform.
Going forward, Wells Fargo intends to offer clients more fine-grained control over how they share their financial data by allowing them to toggle data sharing on and off and manage what data is shared with Envestnet | Yodlee-supported apps within Wells Fargo's digital Control Tower feature. The bank plans to start launching the experience with select app providers that work with Envestnet | Yodlee by the end of the year.
The collaboration between Wells Fargo and Envestnet | Yodlee could quickly boost the value of Control Tower for Wells Fargo customers. Control Tower, which helps centralize customers' digital access to their cards and account information, already offers fairly sophisticated functionality: In addition to basic capabilities like turning cards on or off, it also displays a list of merchants that clients may have had recurring transactions with in the last 12 months—a feature supported by only 35% of the 20 banks in Business Insider Intelligence's US Mobile Banking Competitive Edge Study 2019 (Enterprise only).
But the partnership with Envestnet | Yodlee will expand Control Tower's capabilities by enabling clients to extend or refuse access to their financial data to third parties. Organizing all of these capabilities under a single feature could help drive up Wells Fargo customers' satisfaction with the bank's mobile app.
And facilitating frictionless connections with third-party financial wellness apps can help Wells Fargo seize on consumers' growing usage of fintech apps in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Pandemic-driven economic uncertainty has thrown many consumers into financial turmoil, while the stay-at-home orders have driven many others to rely on digital money management tools: A recent Plaid survey of US consumers revealed that 59% are using more fintech apps than they were before the crisis.
That means the relative value of enabling customers to seamlessly link their bank accounts with third parties has likely risen. Wells Fargo's Envestnet | Yodlee deal could therefore drive considerable stickiness among existing consumers as they link up their accounts with a variety of other apps.
