The company knows where to invest their money and how much you owe on your mortgage. We know the credit card numbers, the amount of your weekly paycheck and the amount you actually spend on shoes.
If you have placed online, you've probably used Yodlee without knowing it. More than 200 financial institutions, including Citibank and Bank of America to use their services, touching nearly 26 million consumers. Your bank probably uses its technology, too, but Yodlee does not like to name names.
Yodlee is the proverbial man behind the curtain. So what exactly does it do?
When you log into your bank and transfer money between your savings and checking accounts, which is Yodlee to provide the technology to make the transaction happen. Paying a bill online? Yodlee. Register for an account? Yodlee. Analyze what you spend? Yodlee.
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Then there are its finest financial management tools. Yodlee can add all the consumer financial information and serve a bank or personal finance Web site such as Mint.com, which lets you view your financial health in an instant.
For example, Bank of America, the website, customers can see all their bank accounts in one place. Behind the scenes, Yodlee has scraped your financial data from its various lenders - student loans, mortgage holder, credit cards, 401 (k), checking, savings - and gave it to Bank of America. (With a login and permissions, of course. But more on that later.) In this way, you can analyze spending, budget and objectives set by all accounts.
"Unlike Facebook and Google, which are very visible, Yodlee has quietly nurtured the same type of services across all banks," said Schwark Satyavolu, who co-founded Yodlee and worked there for eight years before moving to start his own company, a startup online personal finance called BillShrink. "Yodlee is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, but did not even realize it's there."
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It is also the only gorilla in the room. Founded in 1999, Redwood City, California-based company has a strong advantage over their competitors just like Geezeo and Strands.
"Yodlee was clearly the most innovative and technologically savvy cultural perspective - which is about taking calculated risks," said Devon Kinkead, CEO of Micronotes, a new company that is using the services of Yodlee. "What we have done is build a platform and invited a group of strong companies, innovative and banks, so they are very well positioned for growth and have become very difficult to compete."
In fact, some competitors - Strands like - are actually turning to Yodlee for their data aggregation services.
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"Even his competitors are called clients, which is a pretty good situation to be," said Ron Shevlin, senior analyst specializing in retail banking at Aite Group. "While the market is not going to get down to them, given their ability and their history, have a good chance of staying on top."
And for some companies, in partnership with Yodlee has been a life or death decision. Wesabe, a site of financial management principles, attributes of their inability to despise Yodlee. Wesabe Mint.com was a competitor, and one chose to work with Yodlee, and one did not.
"Since [Yodlee] had effectively has no competitors, I do not think you should join our company to a single source provider," founder Marc Hedlund Wesabe recently wrote in his blog. "Mint Yodlee ... used to automatically obtain the user's data bank sites and import them into Mint, and the result was a user experience much easier to get bank data imported."
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Mint.com is considered the leader in the area of personal finance management and was recently acquired by Intuit. As part of the agreement, however, is the transition to internal aggregation of Intuit, instead of Yodlee.
One of the reasons given for avoiding Wesabe Yodlee was his property, which meant Mint, too. In particular, the Mint said he was concerned because the company had not yet acquired.
"That has always been a concern," said Aaron Patzer, vice president of Intuit Personal Finance and founder of Mint.com. "They have been around for 11 years so it is less worrying now, but since they are a private company that is hard to know how they are doing."
Yodlee, which is backed by investors such as Accel and Warburg Pincus, said he has seen revenues rise 30% over the past three years and now has 700 employees.
"Our finances are extremely strong," said chief marketing and strategy Yodlee, Joe Polverari. "In terms of being acquired, our goal is not to be the classic model of 'Pump It Up and hype up' for someone to buy it. - Our goal was to be the next real platform for financial services"
But Shevlin said he can think of a number of companies likely to have Yodlee on their radar.
"The high-tech companies that provide all the basic applications very boring for the management of transactions to banks - that space really has been consolidating," he said. "Fidelity Information Services, Fiserv, Jack Henry - any of them could be good candidates for the acquisition of Yodlee and the creation of a single window for banks."
So, with Yodlee as broad access to information for consumers should be concerned about your privacy?
"There is no reason why anyone should be more concerned about Yodlee security that the security of your bank, or any company that does business with the Internet," said Shevlin.
Yodlee is audited and monitored by the federal government, like a bank. It is also audited by the financial institutions it serves. And he said Polverari, Yodlee has never had a security violation.
"The proof of the pudding is that we had all the major banks audit every single piece of our infrastructure - everything from our data center to our office - and we had the cumulative feedback of all banks and became a fortress Yodlee "said Satyavolu. "Not only is safe, but with the privacy policy [Yodlee's] financial data of an individual is completely useless."
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