Security Breach Concern Over All-in-one Account
Sun Herald
Sunday November 5, 2000
Account aggregation or screen scraping will be for online financial services what ATMs are to street-level banking, reports Karin Derkley of Personal Investor magazine.
A ONE-SITE, one-click service that promises to consolidate your whole financial life is about to take off.
Your account balances, transaction histories, investments, home loan accounts and credit details will be gathered into a neat list of on-screen information.
AMP and Macquarie Bank recently launched their versions of aggregate accounts, while Suncorp Metway is about to launch its OneSource.
With account aggregation, you don't need to be wealthy or even be a customer of the financial institution.
All you need is enough online accounts to welcome the idea of someone gathering them together in one place.
Indeed, any information that can be retrieved online can be provided by an account aggregation site: frequent flier points, web-based e-mail, sharemarket information, search engines and news services.
But to use the service you are required to hand over your passwords to a third party. For example, Suncorp Metway only packages its service.
Corillian, a US-based aggregator host (in turn powered by VerticalOne) stores the passwords and collects the data in a vault in the US. AMP also uses VerticalOne, while Macquarie's enrichment.com.au also uses Corillian.
Concerns about these issues have been serious enough to delay the Commonwealth Bank from rolling out the fully functional version of its MyMoney service.
``Basically, aggregation sites are asking customers to breach the terms and conditions of their bank accounts by handing over their passwords to a third party," said Stephen Coulter, general manager, global eCommerce, at Commonwealth Bank.
By handing over your passwords you could be putting at risk your right to limited liability if somebody makes unauthorised transactions on your account.
And consensus is that this is the tip of the iceberg.
Account aggregation comes into its own when you can use it to transfer funds, buy shares, pay off your credit card before it's due, shop around for the best home loan rates, get the site to do a price comparison on a DVD player, for example, and pay for it there and then.
That's when it is likely to save you serious money.
A report by research consultant McKinsey & Co in the US says that consumers who use aggregated services to manage their bill-paying, borrowing and investing could save themselves almost $3,000 a year.
When one party or bank is offering an aggregation service, but funds are taken from an account held by another institution, questions of liability and scrutiny become very muddy should errors or fraud occur.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is only just now starting to look at the regulatory issues and other implications the service raises with a view to further protecting consumers.
As the regulation stands, your right to a $50 liability limit, should unauthorised transactions take place on your account, is revoked if you knowingly disclose your PIN or password to any third party.
* Personal Investor, on sale now, includes a 15-page special report on global investing.
© 2000 Sun Herald
Share This