What is accountchek.com? How secure is accountchek.com?
As I am an IT professional i might sound over sensitive but I am doing a mortgage refinance right now. My lender, who is legitimate (I used them a few years ago for the original purchase of my home), is asking me to help them verify my bank account balances via a service called accountchek.com (not to be confused with accountcheck.com).
Apparently the way this service works is that you go to the site, put in your e-mail address, the last 4 digits of your SSN, and some code that your lender pre-configured for you. Once you do that, it asks you for the username and passwords of all of your bank accounts so it can verify your balances. I called my lender and asked incredulously if they seriously expect me to do this. Yes, yes, they do.
Is it just me, or does this go against everything we've ever been taught about giving out passwords to third parties? I guess this is sort of a meta, philosophical question rather than one that has to do with technology, but since technology is in the mix here, I thought I'd request some feedback.
This is a very bad idea, but yes, various aggregators do exactly this. One of the few upsides of the new Open Banking and PSD2 regulations will mean aggregators are no longer going to need this sort of nonsense, as banks will provide APIs to share data. It does present a huge challenge around understanding where data loss may have occurred after an incident, but for the customer there is a massive increase in security in not putting all these user
ame and password combinations in aggregators database.
What is Accountchek?
AccountChek is an unbiased third party service used by lenders to collect your digital account statements. Submitting your information online through the AccountChek service is significantly more secure than emailing, faxing, or mailing copies of your account statements. And unlike the other methods, AccountChekis accessible from any device 24/7 and quick to use. AccountChek may also reduce the time it takes for your loan to close, because of the time savings for your loan officer.