Cleo was a cool thing to try out but as soon as I found out about Emma I dropped it.
It had a strange bug where, if your bank auth failed, it would only ever reply to you saying ‘hey let’s fix your details’ - so it didn’t respond to ‘stop messaging me’ or ‘delete account’ or anything like that. It was a loop.
I guess some people might be in to having a conversational bot for budgeting but I much prefer a dashboard-style app. There’s only so much rich data you can share over a Messenger conversation. Having updates on your budget is cool but for me the best thing about Emma is simply being able to see all my transactions across all my accounts in one place in a list.
The truth about my relationship with Cleo is that the first thing I did after installing it was swearing, so I think I got blocked by the Facebook system and haven’t been able to use it ever since.
I do check their web dashboard from time to time and my opinion is that they don’t love product as much as we do.
I’ve got Yolt too. I really like it and the new notifications are an improvement. I did have to spend a lot more time training the categorisation in Yolt though. I’ve also had less connection issues with them. Think Amex and Barclays card are still requiring re-done in Emma
Tried MD and dropped it instantly for being crap.
Dropped Facebook so anything that uses that is a no go.
Yes, TrueLayer was having a big issue with Amex last month, so we switched everyone to Saltedge and Barclaycard changed their authentication system by introducing a memorable word.
After September this year, we will need to ask consent every 90 days, meaning that this will become the norm.
I tried a number of account aggregators for several weeks last year: Emma, Yolt, MoneyHub, Money Dashboard, and HSBC Connected Money.
Of these, I prefer and have settled on Emma. I think the main reason is I like that attention seems to be given to providing rich transaction information in Emma (actual merchant names, logos, notes field, transaction history with merchant). This is not done as well, or at all, in other aggregators. I also found syncing in Emma to incredibly reliable and fast compared to the other aggregators. At least this was the case last year when I was directly comparing. This year, occasional syncing issues seem to have crept it to Emma with some banks. Hope this is just temporary.
Now I only use Emma and Yolt. I keep Yolt around simply to provide access to Sainsbury’s bank which is not supported in Emma.
Have just taken a look at Bankin after I saw it mentioned at the top of this thread. Have not tried it out thoroughly yet, but I have noticed it has one feature which I wish Emma had. I have a thread about that here.
None at the moment. But there was recently an issue with Amex and there was something else a couple of months ago, but I forget which bank. Last year I had zero issues.
I only use Yolt for Sainsbury’s at the moment, and they use screen scraping for that. Seems to work fine. When I was directly comparing Emma and Yolt last year, Emma was more reliable. There were one or two banks I had issues with in Yolt, but can’t remember if they had started open banking connections back then.
Tried them all mentioned here.
Using Emma and HSBC connect. I do like the first page of connect.
Added advantage of connect is… That it picked up it’s own loan accounts. This is no fault of Emma… Just lack of as API .