When you're compiling data from myriad sources, whether it's used to analyze your customer’s financial performance, to help verify accounts and onboard new customers to your financial application, or even to help them find the best loans, credit cards, and financial products – you can't just pull data from any data aggregator you find. It's important to choose a secure and reliable data aggregation platform that can provide you with the best financial data that has been enriched, cleaned, and allows you to make accurate assessments of your customer’s financial health.
At Envestnet® | Yodlee®, rather than trying to provide "mile wide, inch deep" coverage, we provide access to the most comprehensive financial data across retail banking, credit and wealth management, made possible through the strengths of our data acquisition capabilities, extensive data cleaning and enrichment expertise, and massive scale. Think of it as a "mile wide, mile deep" coverage. We work with more than 1,000 financial institutions, including 13 of the top 20 U.S. banks, and have a data network built with tens of millions of consumers who use different fintech apps and platforms that rely on our financial data. By leveraging data science and the latest in artificial intelligence capabilities, we are rapidly able to enrich the quality of data to service multiple segments within the ever-changing financial services space. We're able to provide a holistic view of a consumer’s financial picture, so that they can use innovative applications and services to improve their financial wellness.
Below are the four main requirements that help to explain why a company developing innovative solutions with financial data should partner with Envestnet | Yodlee.
1. Depth and Breadth of Data: Financial service companies need access to data with a lot of depth and breadth. Rather than just drawing data from one or two sources, it’s beneficial to work with a data aggregator that can draw data from multiple sources, clean and analyze it, and share it as a single source. Envestnet | Yodlee provides access to over 16,000 global data sources and hundreds of account types, and aggregate it all into a single API. This enables us to provide banks, credit card providers, lenders, wealth managers, and financial wellness/advisory professionals with complete, accurate, and up-to-date information.
2. Data Clarity: Transaction data enrichment is the practice of cleaning data and converting garbled code into something easy to read and understand. Millions and millions of transactions pass through our system daily, and we use machine learning to deliver the merchant name, a simple description of the purchase, geo-location, and contextual categories. Also called financial data enrichment, this enriched data becomes a building block for data analysis, to help you better understand your customers and provide them with more meaningful information. The clarified data can reduce call-center and fraud-chain costs. It can also be used to understand customer spending and saving habits, payment preferences, share of wallet, and even what financial services are best suited for specific customer segments.
3. Speed and Simplicity: Ease of API integration is important to developers, and Envestnet | Yodlee is able to offer both speed and simplicity. Our ongoing platform investment hides the cost and complexity of daily data aggregation to provide a unified view into heterogeneous bank data so you can get to market quickly and easily. Daily data updates and 24x7 operational monitoring give you peace of mind so you can focus on building innovative apps. This improves the developer experience through simplified coding, reduced integration costs, and shorter production timelines. It also means that data is retrieved much more quickly because data requests are handled as a single event rather than through several individual API calls. That shortens the customer onboarding process and reduces abandonment rates.
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning: Financial service providers also need sophisticated data analytics, which requires a robust data science and AI group to enable that. With AI, you can create a new class of products, services, and business models, as well as offer personalized, predictive, and prescriptive solutions to customers. AI and machine learning can also be used to aid in compliance with regulations or fraud detection. We use AI and machine learning since there are over 21 million merchants in the U.S. alone, so creating a program to match everything up is nearly impossible. Machine learning enables us to learn what the transactions mean and do its own deciphering, so that we can provide aggregation at scale. As more data comes in, the smarter the AI becomes and the better and faster it gets, which means cleaner data delivered at a faster pace for all of our customers.
Data aggregation has a reputation for being rather complex and expensive, but thanks to our artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, we've made it very simple and inexpensive to implement. It's easy for developers to integrate our single API and that's why we're seeing more disruptive solutions leveraging our platform across the entire financial services landscape – such as for lending, credit, and financial wellness applications. We have created a white paper on how to best choose an aggregation platform, which is available on our website. You can download it here, and then speak to one of our representatives if you have any further questions.
