Linking my accounts with Facet

Finicity Logo 2017
1200px-Plaid_logo.svg
yodlee

Facet uses Finicity, Plaid & Yodlee, three of the industry’s leading secure, encrypted services, to link your bank and investment accounts. With each, your financial planner will be able to see frequent updates on all of your linked accounts, so they can give you even better and more timely advice. 

Plaid, which is owned by Visa, is the trusted link used by Venmo, Fannie Mae, American Express, EllieMae, Expensify, and many others. Finicity is owned by MasterCard and is a trusted partner with Bank of America and Rocket Mortgage. Yodlee, which is owned by Envestnet, is the trusted link used by Microsoft and other Envestnet products. 

Linking my accounts

We ask you to link your accounts for two reasons:

  1. When your accounts are linked your planner can see your current, complete financial information. That helps them give you the most timely, helpful advice.

     

  2. By linking your accounts, you can get an instant overview of your financial life, chart your progress and get the information you need to make the best financial and life decisions.

Finicity, a subsidiary of MasterCard, is used by some of the largest and most innovative organizations in the world, including Facet, to empower our customers with greater insight into their finances. Finicity is committed to consumer-centric data practices, ensuring consumers have a say in how and where their information should be used.

With the addition of Finicity, Facet is further investing in our client’s experience in pursuing their financial goals.

Plaid, a subsidiary of Visa, is a secure platform that provides an easy and seamless way to link accounts so that your Facet CFP® Professional can give you advice based on the most complete and up-to-date information. Plaid supports over 9,600 financial institutions in the U.S. and Canada, from national financial services organizations to local credit unions. Plaid supports an increasing number of international financial institutions and business accounts, as well. Plaid is the critical, secure link for 10s of millions of consumer accounts, which justifies our choice to use it for Facet clients.

Yodlee, a subsidiary of Envestnet, is an online banking solution provider that connects to thousands of online banking websites and financial institutions worldwide. They retrieve financial information and then make that information electronically available to customers on a range of financial platforms.

Yodlee is one of the leading data aggregation and data analytics platforms, helping consumers live better financial lives through innovative products and services created for more than 1,400 financial institutions and FinTech companies, including 15 of the top 20 U.S. banks.

In short, yes. To get into the details, Finicity,  Plaid & Yodlee use multi-factor authentication, encryption, and other security measures to safeguard information. All three maintain SOC 2 Type II certification, the industry’s gold standard, and regularly undergoes compliance and internal and external network penetration tests. All three are also regularly tested and reviewed by independent auditors.

None of the three handle transactions, have access to your money, or store passwords. Instead, each simply authenticates accounts, verifying that the accounts listed in your Facet Wealth dashboard belong to you, and then updates your financial information daily.

While never a requirement, you will be invited to enter your online financial institution credentials. We never see those credentials, nor do we store them. Your credentials are securely passed to your financial institution and we are provided with a read-only feed of balance and transaction information. We do not have access to your money nor can we make any changes to your account.  If for whatever reason you want to remove our read-only access, you will be able to de-link those accounts.

I'm having issues.

We are continuously working to support as many financial institutions within the U.S. as possible, there are many that are not yet integrated with either Finicity or Plaid.  If your institution does not appear when searching, you may add your account manually from the client dashboard.

The number of financial institutions in the U.S. is astounding. Establishing connections with each of those institutions is difficult. Each bank has its own rules and practices when it comes to security and authentication that we must work through in order to secure your data. We work with Plaid & Finicity to establish those direct connections with many financial institutions.

However, not every financial institution supports online connections from third parties. Additionally, these institutions undergo their own changes and circumstances that alter those connections. As a result, you may periodically be unable to connect to your institution’s account when accessing it from Facet.

If this happens, see the tab below on “Common account linking errors”. If you’re still having problems, you may either manually add an account to your profile or attempt to connect later—many connection issues within several hours to a day.

If all else fails, you can manually add an account to inform your planner and your plan. To do so, navigate to your dashboard and click “Add Account”. From there you will be presented with the option to “Link Accounts” or “Manually enter accounts”. Try adding an account manually.

Common account linking errors

If you’re having trouble connecting to your institution through Facet, we recognize that such issues are frustrating for you. Please review the list of errors and troubleshooting steps listed below. If those do not work, Plaid nor Finicity may not yet be integrated with your institution, however, we recommend waiting and attempting to connect to your institution again after a day or so as many issues tend to be resolved by Plaid and Finicity with time.

Of course, we’d be happy to help as well; please feel free to contact your planner or [email protected].

Your institution does not recognize your username and password combination. Please verify that your login credentials are working properly by logging in directly to your institution’s website. If your credentials are working properly, try re-entering them with Facet.

Some institutions may require you to answer certain security questions. If you see an error around these questions, you may have answered one of your questions incorrectly.

The Multi-Factor Authentication could be a security question or a code sent to you via text message or email. Try logging into your institution’s site and changing your security settings to enable multi-factor authentication or try having them ask security questions rather than send a code.

Some institutions will require that you log in via their site to verify that you attempted to add your account to Facet. Please log in to your institution and complete the items they require.

Your institution may occasionally change those security requirements from time-to-time. If that happens, we may no longer be able to connect with your account. Please log in to your institution’s portal and verify the settings for these accounts.

If you have not set up online account access with your financial institution, you’ll have to do that before connecting with Facet.

Your bank is not yet supported, you may add your account manually.