MoneyStrands, the online banking dashboard, turned off it’s automatic updates feature over the last week. They have been very vague about timescales, but I’ve learned through their official Twitter channel that it’s going to be offline for months, and there’s very little explanation why.
'Atenttion' - even the notice has a typo
It’s generally quite a suspicious situation, as this information was quickly provided by Twitter but MoneyStrands have avoided all mention of timeframes on their online FAQ.
MoneyStrands response on Twitter
It’s made even more strange by the fact that it comes so quickly after a redesign and launch of commercial products. I can’t see anyone having enough loyalty to stick with the service for such an extended break in the core service. Finally, there’s no way to manually upload a file to an ‘automatic’ account, so I’d need to set up all of my accounts and settings again. No chance.
Automatic updates are a core benefit of these online services, as you can easily aggregate all your accounts into one place.
Last year, I reviewed a number of online banking aggregators (MoneyStrands review, Lovemoney review) that would handle automatic updates from UK accounts, after Wesabe went down. Of all the sites I reviewed, MoneyStrands came out on top for it’s UK support and great interface. Such a shame that this has now been struck down by a technical problem and even worse customer service in its handling.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Phil- I’m sorry for the vagueness in our post, let me explain further what is happening.
moneyStrands is not closing down. Our service is still available via manual file uploads. In fact, a large portion of our user base have been regularly using it in manual only mode. Due to business reasons we have paused automatic account aggregation and have decided to replace our backend aggregation system. This process has begun but will take at least a few months to complete, thus the refrain from providing an exact date. We are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you and other users taking advantage of the daily refresh capability. In turn, we have provided a full refund to everyone who has submitted payment.
On a related note I’d like to also point out that moneyStrands is a product of Strands Personal Finance, a leading provider of online and mobile personal finance management solutions for global financial institutions. As such, working with banks to help them improve their online banking sites remains our core business and will continue to feed our consumer product, moneyStrands.
I hope this provides some further context into our decision. If you have any additional questions, feel free to email us at info [at] moneyStrands [dot com].
Lucia
Community Manager
What a lame response from Moneystrands. It is quite clear something is seriously wrong with the company. You don’t launch a new website, start charging customers for the service and then immediately take it offline.
I have been a member for over a year. Initially emails were answered within 24 hours. Over the last couple of months I have sent a number of emails about a number of issues and have not received a SINGLE response.
There was no warning of the outage and the dreadfully misspelt message has never been corrected (Atenttion…so it wont not available…).
Needless to say I am about to delete all my account records on moneystrands and will never have anything to do with this shower again.
“Our service is still available via manual file uploads. In fact, a large portion of our user base have been regularly using it in manual only mode.”
If this is true, which I highly doubt, the only reason it’s happening is because those people are hard-wired into your system and at this point and they’re hoping you’re going to be back online soon so they don’t have to start from scratch somewhere else. As soon as they realize how long the automatic updates are going to be offline they’ll be closing their accounts, guaranteed.
Without automatic updates your system is completely useless. If I’m already logging into my other accounts to download files to do a manual update on MoneyStrands, why don’t I just look at my balances while I’m there?
If it’s going to be months before automatic updates are back online, you might as well just close this part of your business now and save yourself some money. Seriously. You really think people are going to wait around for this to be fixed when there are much better free, working services out there?
Sigh, I guess it is time to go to another online personal finance site (this will be my 3rd move). This time I think I will just bite the bullet and finally move to mint.com, of all of these services it seems that it is the only one that won’t go out of business tomorrow.
I’ve just been reminded by a calendar event to check out the MoneyStrands web site and surprise, suprise nothing has changed.
I can hardly believe the ineptness of this company. The blog section still has the tag line “The New and Improved moneyStrands Has Arrived” – they have just inserted a couple of lines to say that automatic aggregation is suspended. Apparently, for more information “click here”. You, of course, are given no further information at all. It’s laughable.
On a positive note, I have changed to the UK sited MoneyDashboard and can recommend it. It doesn’t quite have the useability that MoneyStrands HAD, but it is getting close. There have been numerous updates over the last 3 months and they response very quickly to questions and feedback. If they carry on in this way I think it will get there.