J.P. Morgan, Intuit to Give Website Users Wider Access to Bank Data -- Update

By Emily Glazer and Peter Rudegeair 

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Intuit Inc. have ended a long standoff with a new agreement to let the bank's customers check account information on the technology firm's sites without sharing their Chase passwords.

The nation's largest bank struck the deal with the owner of Mint.com, TurboTax Online and QuickBooks Online in an effort to ease tension with operators of increasingly popular personal-finance websites and applications, the companies said.

The New York bank disclosed details about the new partnership Wednesday morning. Under terms of the agreement, J.P. Morgan and the Intuit sites will work together without requiring bank consumers to share their passwords more broadly than J.P. Morgan Chase recommends.

The issue of whether bank customers should share their passwords with outside companies that aggregate financial data erupted in late 2015, when big banks including J.P. Morgan, Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. temporarily limited the flow of information to some websites including Intuit's.

Under this week's agreement, a few million affected J.P. Morgan Chase customers will be able to authorize the bank to electronically share their financial information with Intuit's financial-management sites, which include consumer destinations Mint and TurboTax and small-business site QuickBooks. In the past, such customers had to manually enter their Chase passwords into the sites.

Many banks said the old arrangement could compromise cybersecurity and overload bank websites at busy times when the aggregator sites would request updated information about consumer accounts from bank servers.

Now, "customers will get to decide what they want to share and when they want to share it -- without having to hand over their password," said J.P. Morgan Chief James Dimon in a statement.

H. Tayloe Stansbury, technology chief at Mountain View, Calif.-based Intuit, said the new deal would give customers more real-time access to their data and would enable them to make better financial decisions.

The bank will begin to roll this out to new Mint customers in the first half of 2017.

J.P. Morgan Chase customers who want to do business with Intuit will be authorized to download their bank-account data through a bank-provided token that doesn't involve the handover of login details, said Gordon Smith, the bank's head of consumer and community banking.

Data will be shared via an application-programming interface, or API, which the companies say is more efficient and secure than the previous method. Bank customers will see their information in the Intuit applications and can turn access on and off. Intuit also agrees it won't sell customer data to third parties, which has been a concern of banks including J.P. Morgan.

J.P. Morgan Chase and Intuit said they will pursue similar agreements with other companies. In June, Wells Fargo & Co. announced a similar partnership with small business accounting firm Xero where customers don't have to share their bank passwords and will be directed to a secure Wells Fargo server where they can share certain account information. The bank then said it would like to use the partnership as a blueprint for dealings with other more widely used sites.

While bilateral agreements between two big companies are a good first step, there will ultimately need to be more industrywide standards for data-sharing that include smaller banks and startups, says Beth Brockland, a managing director at the Center for Financial Services Innovation, an industry group.

J.P. Morgan's Mr. Dimon wrote in his annual shareholder letter in April that the bank analyzed many of the contracts third parties use and found more information is taken than the third party needs to do its job.

"When we all readily click 'I agree' online or on our mobile devices, allowing third-party access to our bank accounts and financial information, it is fairly clear that most of us have no idea what we are agreeing to," he wrote.

Write to Emily Glazer at [e-mail] and Peter Rudegeair at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 25, 2017 09:38 ET (14:38 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.