EWC+ is coming to Chase!

I'll believe Express Web Connect is faster and more reliable when I see it. My existing EWC financial institution downloads are very slow.

You mean "Express Web Connect+" I presume?

We'll see if there's a significant difference...

Hi there! From what I've seen with the Schwab implementation a few months back (and I had none of the issues that others did, but I followed the directions to the 't'), there's no end user difference that I can tell. I would think it's all internal plumbing. And that indeed might be very significant although we can't see it through the User Interface (security, ease of maintaining back end, etc.)

I too made it through the Schwab switch from Direct Connect to EWC+, and since then have had zero download problems with Schwab for multiple investment accounts and user-id's (though my approach to avoiding problems was not to re-activate my Schwab accounts for EWC+ until I believed most of the legitimate public complaints had been addressed). I think there are several things to consider here:

- EWC+ is almost an entirely different mechanism for downloading than EWC (importantly with EWC+, the financial institution plays a required key role in selecting and formatting the transactions to be downloaded, before passing the transactions on to the aggregator (Intuit, in the case of Quicken). That also means no more screen scraping!

- Schwab was one of the first to switch to EWC+. I believe future switches should experience fewer problems - as more financial institutions get on board, lessons learned from early switches should result in an improved process.

- Schwab is using EWC+ to download investment transactions - EWC was virtually never used for investment transactions (I believe EWC was largely incapable of doing a reliable job on investment transactions). I think this is a good indication that the EWC+ process is noticeably more robust - especially at the key point: the conversion of financial institution data to a single data format that can be processed by multiple disparate applications

- EWC+ is more secure than EWC

- EWC+ is less expensive than Direct Connect for the financial institution - hopefully this will help insure that downloading remains viable

A couple of downsides:

- EWC+ downloaded data is not available in the Quicken OFX Log file. It's in a separate Quicken log file and it's "encrypted", so basically unusable to verify the actual contents of an EWC+ download.

- EWC allowed One Step Update to be interrupted to request the user supply some 2FA response. I think that EWC+ should obviate the need for that option; if not, that annoyance could remain. For some more detailed information about the underlying standard for EWC+ (known as "Financial Data Exchange", or FDX), see

Now all Chase financial data will be aggregated by Quicken.com/Intuit. Schwab already did this last September. Am I the only person scared that nearly financial data will be aggregated in one spot???

Two issues with EWC+:

1. Schwab requires that you release them of their Security Guarantee if you use it. Which means that if Quicken or Intuit (that does the actual aggregation of data) does something bad with your data, Schwab can refuse to honor their Security Guarantee.
2. Quicken and/or Intuit will have access to nearly all financial data, especially as more and more financial institutions use the service in favor of Direct Connect and Web Connect.

Do we really want Intuit to have access to nearly all financial data???