Help! My bank account is disconnected or not updating properly đŸ˜–
Banks are making it easier to manage your connections
untied links to your bank accounts using a standard called open banking. Larger financial institutions are required to provide access to your account data - and open banking is the way they do this.
One of the features is that you need to consent every 90 days for your data to be brought in. But the way that it was built meant that people found it a nuisance.
So the regulators changed this to make it easier. Since late 2022, banks have been rolling out a slightly different journey to renewing your permission - you'll be able to do it without needing to log into your bank.
As a result, some banks are also changing their systems which set up the connection.
Long term, this is good for users of untied and other platforms.
You may need to create a new bank connection
This means that may need to create a new bank connection rather than refreshing
Short term, our users may find that you are asked to renew your bank connection, but it then fails. It's annoying.
To fix this, try connecting your account as a new connection rather than refreshing/reconnecting your existing one. Do not disconnect or remove the account before doing this or you may lose your transactions! We have checks in place to prevent it from creating duplicate transactions but it should create a new consent.
This should bring transactions through going forward. If it creates a second account, don't delete the original account as that could hide transactions too.
Dropped connections
We still get reports of feeds dropping. We have put lots of controls in to try to see what is going on. For one major bank what was happening was that it would only support one open banking use at a time - you'd connect to untied, then use open banking for something else, and it would drop.
But for others (and there are a couple of names that keep coming up) we just can't identify why the bank is dropping it, so please be patient if we do have to ask you to connect again, and again.
Slow or delayed feeds, and duplicate or missing transactions
It would be great if bank feeds were perfect, but there's a lot going on when you make a transaction.
A purchase can start as a pending transaction with one value, and within a few days it's been cancelled, or has a different value, and a different status. This is most common with transport transactions but can even happen when you buy something from a supermarket.
Like most accounting products you only want final transactions to appear in untied - and actually the feed we get doesn't always show them until they are final. However your banking app may show them while they're pending - that means that it may seem that untied is slow to bring transactions in.
Other things may be inconsistent - the treatment of pots (some bank feeds treat them as separate accounts, others don't show them at all - it's down to the bank), bank fees and interest.
And at times the feed can show duplicate transactions - generally there's nothing we can do ... we're just reporting what we get from them.
There can also be missing tranasctions - the best way to avoid these is to keep your connections up to date! We'd love to automate the refresh of permissions but we're not allowed to do so under the regulations that affect open banking.
Internal server errors
Occasionally you may get an "internal server error". It may be a short term issue but if this persists get in touch.
If you do have any problems, get in touch as always.