Online Bill Pay: Are payee-to-payee transfers permitted, and if so, why aren’t they available?
Payments
Asked by Question Bot01/Nov/20121 answer
1 Answer
F
Faisal Khan
Answered 01/Nov/2012
Its a programming / systems integration nightmare for a feature that very few people might require.
Mint.com is able to extract the data, because they have invested a lot of time and effort to connect with almost all the banks and other financial networks, etc.
Lets say there are 100 banks, if Bank 1 has to tie into Bank 2, Bank 3, Bank 4 ... Bank 100, you can imagine how much work they would have to do. Not just from a technology point of view, but from a security, communications, audit, internal compliance, legal point of view.
Now lets do Bank 2, which will have to connect to Bank 1, Bank 3, Bank 4, ... Bank 100.
I think you get the general idea.
Throw in the fact that if one bank makes changes to its API or core banking, etc. which disrupts the flow of the data, then 99 banks would have to make changes at their end.
Coming to reality, considering that there are 8,000+ institutions in the US, this is a huge task. Mint only specializes and interacts with those that have Internet Banking (hence ease of connecting). Even if only 1,000 banks are to be connected, having them to agree to this concept by itself would be a big task, than actually performing it.
Mint.com is able to extract the data, because they have invested a lot of time and effort to connect with almost all the banks and other financial networks, etc.
Lets say there are 100 banks, if Bank 1 has to tie into Bank 2, Bank 3, Bank 4 ... Bank 100, you can imagine how much work they would have to do. Not just from a technology point of view, but from a security, communications, audit, internal compliance, legal point of view.
Now lets do Bank 2, which will have to connect to Bank 1, Bank 3, Bank 4, ... Bank 100.
I think you get the general idea.
Throw in the fact that if one bank makes changes to its API or core banking, etc. which disrupts the flow of the data, then 99 banks would have to make changes at their end.
Coming to reality, considering that there are 8,000+ institutions in the US, this is a huge task. Mint only specializes and interacts with those that have Internet Banking (hence ease of connecting). Even if only 1,000 banks are to be connected, having them to agree to this concept by itself would be a big task, than actually performing it.