A couple of days ago, I received an email, stating that "Bank of America is changing the way it connects with personal finance management solutions like Quicken." It further states that for BillPay, I'll have to log onto BofA's website or use their mobile app. The email further states that in order to maintain BillPay through Quicken, I need to migrate to Quicken BillPay, which is a subscription service.
Last night, I called BofA to ask what was going on & they stiff-armed me, saying I needed to take the issue up with Quicken Support. After spending an hour & a half, being transferred to the 4th BofA representative, I was finally told that it relates to Express Web Connect+. I was told that BofA customers who already have DirectConnect are grandfathered, & that it's not BofA that is making the change, it's Quicken.
So, is this another push from Quicken to get more revenue, through their subscription based BillPay service?
That statement uses misleading/incorrect terminology.
The old Quicken BIllpay service (which was a "subscription service") was discontinued several years/versions ago.
Currently the only way to pay bills from Quicken now is to use Quicken Bill Manager; and that costs extra only for users of the Quicken Starter and Deluxe editions; but is free (with a limited number of checks/month) for users of the Quicken Premier and Home, Business & Rental Property editions.
That was bad information.
It does. Unlike Direct Connect, Express Web Connect + does not have the ability to transmit billpay instructions from Quicken to the billpayer.
Currently true (for existing BofA Direct Connect customers), but immaterial. When the change to Express Web Connect + is complete, NO BofA customers will be able to send billpay instructions from Quicken to BofA because Direct Connect will not be available for any BofA customers.
That is a flat-out falsehood; unless you want quibble about the meaning. The process of implementing ("making") the change will call for work by BofA (or whomever they hired), Intuit, and Quicken.
But the cause of this change is - and only could be - 100% BofA's doing. Quicken probably likes the idea; but Quicken has not, and can not, force any financial institution to use Express Web Connect + (or any specific Connection Method).
No.
Again, NO! See above.
Also note that you can make arrangements with most vendors to have your payments automatically deducted from a qualified account (such as your BofA checking account). This approach is simple to setup and very reliable.
------------------------------------- Thank you for the thorough reply.
I guess one of this weekend's chores will be to try to determine what the change will mean, under a combination of auto-draft & perhaps Quicken Bill Manager. I believe I'm running Premier, but will need to confirm.
I just had an online chat session with Quicken Support. That chat, along with your reply likely means I'm headed back into a phone call with BofA.
And please forgive my ignorance, but I believe I saw another post in this group where you had concluded it was possible to get the same standards of of EWC+ into Direct Connect (hypothetically called "DC+")?
As to what good it will do to call BofA, I realize I'm rather insignificant to BofA's grand picture, but sometimes, when the little guy can succinctly express the impact of a change and the impact is tangible & reasonable, the giants listen. If nothing else, I can be one more plea for them to develop "DC+".
An eBill is an electronic version of a bill or statement. The eBill typically contains the same info as a paper bill or statement. You can receive, view, and pay eBills in Bill Pay. When your eBill arrives, it appears in Payment Center. You control the date and amount of your payment.
Quick Facts
- We can receive eBills from hundreds of companies nationwide.
- When you add an eBill, we send the info as a request to the company. After your request has been processed, you receive an eBill in a month or more, depending on your billing cycle.
- Some companies stop sending paper bills when they start sending eBills. Other companies continue to send paper bills in addition to eBills.
- When your eBill arrives, you'll see it in the Payment Center as soon as you select the company from the list of companies and people you pay.
- You can either select the amount due for the bill, which also enters the due date as the delivery date, or you can enter a different amount and date for delivering the payment.
- You can set up AutoPay for some eBills.
- You can stop receiving eBills in Bill Pay any time after the company processes your request for them.
My recollection is that "auto-pay" of eBills was beneficial - and that I would be notified by email of the arrival of an eBill at BofA (including the vendor name and bill amount), and if I wanted BofA to pay that eBill as delivered, I did not need to do anything. If did not want the eBill paid in full by BofA, I had time to logon to BofA and change the processing of that specific bill.
I don't think that will happen. Direct Connect utilizes the OFX protocol, over which BofA has no control. And adding additional security to Direct Connect will do nothing to reduce its costs to the financial institution.
More importantly, I think, is that EWC+ utilizes a new protocol known as FDX (Financial Data Exchange). It costs money to be a member of FDX, and BofA is a member. To me that suggests that they are very much on board with FDX, thus EWC+.
I forgot to mention that Direct Connect financial institutions that offer the ability to send billpay instructions from Quicken pay even more than Direct Connect financial institutions that do not accept billpay instructions from Quicken. That cost will also not go down if additional security is added to Direct Connect.
I no longer bank with USAA, but not because of any Quicken problems with USAA. Other than a brief period when was getting duplicates downloaded from my USAA credit card account, I had no problems downloading from USAA.
But I would not be at all surprised to see USAA switch to EWC+.
And USAA users will not bear any hit from the inability of EWC+ to accept billpay instructions from Quicken, since USAA never allowed that anyway.
Does this new FDX protocol allow for the ability to make online bill payments from Quicken at a bank, such as Chase used to support with DC? I realize it doesn't now, I mean potentially if Quicken and the banks decided to implement it.
I'm by no means an expert, but DC (bank BillPay) appears to be achieved through an OFX protocol, not FDX. At the end of the opening post of the thread below, John said the same security measures (expiring tokens?) could be implemented within OFX. However, and again I'm not an expert, it sounds like OFX is more expensive for the FIs to support than FDX is.
I still plan to talk to BofA again, expressing that this is a service regression, but the probable reality is that Bank BillPay has one foot in the grave & the other on a banana peel. FIs are ceasing to support OFX, in lieu of FDX. BofA appears to just be the next big banking house in line (& I'm just the latest whiny kid feeling the impact).
But I think you should take into account that the receiving and processing of online billpay instructions costs the financial institution more than the one-way "sending" of already cleared transactions.
Direct Connect is "necessary" for online billpay instructions to be sent by Quicken and processed by the financial institution, but Direct Connect is not "sufficient": the financial institution has to agree to pay extra for online billpay.
I believe the old discontinued "Quicken Billpay" (which used a third party processor) could have handled this situation; but that third party began to cost too much for a degraded service and Quicken dropped them ... and gave us "Quicken Bill Manager" instead. Personally, I find Bill Manager to be cumbersome and worthless.
Yes, I realize that, which is why I was wondering whether this newfangled FDX protocol (being new and all) can potentially support the same functionality that OFX does, including online bill pay. Probably a pipe dream considering all the factors working against that happening, but just posing the question. One thing in favor of it is that it looks like it's being adopted pretty much universally by the banks.
Yes, I can sympathize, it's surely not a step forward for Quicken users.
Thanks for the response. Yes, admittedly I don't understand all the factors involved.
As far as the current Bill Manager in Quicken, the online bill part of it did not work well when I tried it briefly for a couple of my bills. Getting and keeping that working for 10 to 12 bills a month looked like it would be more work and frustration than just using manual bills and paying them online at the bank web site.
I could deal with "I'm sorry, but the Eastern Europe thieves are far more clever than we, and this DirectConnect stuff must be ended." far more easily than I could deal with "I'm sorry, but BillPay is just too expensive."
Is no one willing to actually work for their wages, anymore?
Most people and organizations take the cost of things into account when they make financial decisions (sometimes referred to as a "cost/benefit analysis); if they didn't they would face severe financial difficulties.
Some financial institutions do not believe that any Quicken OFX downloads can justify their cost. Some financial institutions permit Express Web Connect (EWC) downloads (the cheapest). Some financial institutions permit Web Connect (WC) downloads (and some also permit EWC downloads). Some financial institutions permit Direct Connect, but no billpay (and some also permit WC and/or EWC downloads). Some financial institutions permit Direct Connect with billpay (and some also permit WC and/or EWC downloads).
There is nothing "wrong" with any of those decisions - at least nothing that someone not privy to the internal discussions/reasoning upon which those decisions are based, could reasonably conclude.
My digging has produced the following, approximate, counts: ~2 million+ Quicken users
~35,000 financial institutions in the U.S. ~16,480 of those 35,000 financial institutions permit some form(s) of OFX download to Quicken ~1900 of those 16,480 financial institutions permit Direct Connect downloads to Quicken ~540 of those 1900 financial institutions accept billpay instructions from Quicken
I believe that over the years, the number of financial institutions offering Direct Connect downloads has shrunk - and I believe that number will continue to shrink. And the only pre-EWC+ alternatives to Direct Connect - Express Web Connect and Web Connect - have significant limitations for users.
As I see it, Express Web Connect+ has a good chance to become the best workable replacement for Direct Connect: EWC+ will reduce cost for the financial institutions to provide near-Direct Connect service. while offering users significant improvements over Express Web Connect and Web Connect.
The financial institutions and financial software companies have come to, what I believe to be, a negotiated agreement that EWC+ is best the way to go.
And I believe that despite the apparently large number of Quicken users; our leverage with financial institutions is very small, since in most cases I believe the number of Quicken users at a given financial institution is maybe, at most, 1%. Financial institutions are not going to spend much money helping such a small percentage of their customers. While financial institutions could require Direct Connect users to pay for DC (and online billpay users to pay even more), I don't think that approach goes over very well with Quicken users.
At the end of the day, we deserve only what we pay for - no more, no less.
In my experience, when I order an iced tea at a restaurant, there's a general expectation that refills of iced tea are complementary for the duration of the meal. Not everyone at the table has to order iced tea, but for those that do, that's a baseline service level.
I'm sure ATMs are expensive to maintain, but ATMs are a baseline service that banks (at least the big ones) generally include at no cost, as long as you use their network. BofA has a pretty extensive ATM network, so their ATMs are relatively easy to get to. I don't use much cash, so that service doesn't benefit me much, but I can understand how it benefits others.
I have no idea of the exact cost to maintain Direct Connect, but relative to BofA's FY2020 $18 billion net income ($6.5 billion in the consumer segment), stating cost savings as the justification to terminate a level of service makes we want to break out my "world's smallest violin."
Furthermore, while Q users might represent 1% of the customer base, but I'd be willing to wager that those in that 1% have a vastly different profile w.r.t. deposit amounts, which I can only assume is better for the banks.
I may be able to get everything that I need done with Q Bill Mgr, but if not, the likely deprecation of Bill Pay thru Direct Connect has a detrimental impact on me. I'm not happy about it, but it appears to be my reality.
I'll get over it, but I'm gonna be grumpy for a while. ;-)
Of course there is a cost. The fact that you do not see it, does not mean it is not there. You also do not see the BofA costs for their electricity or water or janitorial services - but those costs are figured into the charges (such as interest, fees, etc.), and payments (interest, etc.) whose amounts include charges for all BofA expenses.
Also important: the ATM service is there if/when you need it.
Financial institutions don't need your sympathy. They're in business to make a profit, and they have a responsibility to their owners (BofA shareholders in this) to make the most they can, legally and ethically. While it's certainly true that customer satisfaction plays an important part in making a profit; customer satisfaction is just one of several constituencies a company must satisfy. Customers (and humans in general, acting in most any capacity) often tend to think of their desires as being more important (especially when seeking to justify benefits for themselves) to others than they are.
You'll have to provide more evidence than than your willingness to wager.
It seems like a gigantic leap for you to assume that you're in a position to effectively decide which costs are legitimate, and which are not, for organizations whose inner workings you have little or no access to.
Indeed, what you appear to be saying is that all financial institutions are making irrational decisions when they discontinue a service that some of their users (or more particularly, you) enjoy. And, by implication, when those financial institutions fail to provide services users would like. That's going to be an extremely difficult position to defend: making profits is what they're in business for, not providing (or retaining) every service every customer wants.
Quicken too has dropped services that some users liked (Quicken Bill Pay and blue book estimates for car values, come to mind). If you like wagering, I think you can bet that if costs did not matter, those services would still be available.
I've lost track of all the products and services whose benefits I have lost over the years; but I don't look to blame the companies who stopped providing those products and services: if they did not do their job, they would be much more likely to go out of business ... which would be a MUCH bigger disappointment for me.
Just as it would be a much bigger disappointment to me if Quicken went out of business, than if they trimmed their expenses as needed ... even if I lost a little something in the trimming.
[I used Online Bill Pay (now called Bank Bill Pay) quite a bit at one time; but I now only use it to a limited degree. And as I have already noted; there are very good free alternatives to Online Bill Pay - alternatives which I take full advantage of.]
I'm not sure what I use is called. I get there with Tools /Online Center (or by clicking the icon on my toolbar). Is that Bank Bill Pay?
It works fine for me, and I've never considered any alternatives. What I like about it is that a single entry does two things:
either creates an EFT or has a check sent, depending on who I'm paying.
2.Makes an entry in the check register.
Are the alternatives you talk about not part of Quicken? If so, doesn't that mean using the also requires making a separate entry in the Quicken check register, with the possibility that the two are not exactly the same?
Should I consider using one of the alternatives instead? Which one? Why? What are its advantages over what I'm doing now?
BeanSmart website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.