eMoney Advisor integrates with Akoya network to stamp out ‘screen scraping’

eMoney Advisor, the Fidelity-owned financial software planning platform used by more than 70,000 financial professionals across firms of all sizes, announced that it’s joining the Akoya data access network. Akoya, which was incubated within Fidelity and spun off as a separate company in 2020, is a data network that facilitates consumer-permissioned data access through application programming interfaces (APIs).

Why should we care?
With the Akoya tie-up, eMoney Advisor joins the march towards consumer-permissioned data access in lieu of “screen scraping,” a practice whereby third-party apps, through aggregators, log into a banking application as if it were the customer, scrapes their data and pastes it into their own platform. It’s a data-access technique that has fueled a lot of fintech innovation but has also been critiqued for security vulnerabilities. API-based data access is seen as a safer way to transfer data, functioning as a pipe that connects software components and also incorporates security, rights, and permissions. The financial services world is slowly moving toward API-based data access, but the transition is taking time. Akoya is not an aggregator but a network that helps institutions and aggregators connect account data to third parties via APIs. “Our goal is to make financial data access as easy and secure as possible for fintechs and data aggregators, so consumers are empowered to use their services without fear of their login information or personal data getting misused,” said Stuart Rubinstein, CEO of Akoya.