AUSTIN, Texas–Twenty-five percent of log-ins on one credit union’s Internet banking solution came from bots, not consumers, according to a new analysis into “scrapegators,” also known as “aggregators,” which are companies that scrape Internet banking to feed data to other fintech applications.
The findings were compiled by Malauzai Software as part of its monthly Monkey Insights “little-data” report, which seeks to break big data surrounding digital banking into digestible analytic “factoids.”
The report highlights key trends in Internet and mobile banking usage based on January 2018 data for 400-plus banks and credit unions, covering 16.9 million logins from 895,000 active Internet and mobile banking users, according to Malauzai.
“In droves, banking customers are choosing to use third-party financial applications, and NOT the Internet banking site provided by the bank or credit union,” the Monkey Insights Report stated, noting that some of the activity is to validate account ownership or use aggregation technology to access the account once.
Among the findings in the Malauzai report:
- 8% Of Internet Banking Logins Are Scraping Sessions. Eight percent of all Internet banking logins are coming from a scrapegator. “It is a bot accessing, not a real person. We can tell,” the report stated. “The range goes as high as 25% for one particular credit union we study. And logins roughly correlate to end-users, so 8% – 10% of Internet banking end-users are choosing to scrape. What does that really mean? It means that consumers are NOT finding the feature in Internet banking AND they are finding it in a fintech vendor. The financial institutions are at some level failing to meet the needs of their consumers.”
- Balances & Transactions = 90% Of Activity. “The most popular screen In Internet banking to scrape is the balance screen,” the report found. “Next, is the transaction history, or really recent transaction history as not many scrapegator sessions go deeper than a single screen of transactions, after all, it’s hard for a scraping program to page forward. Very few scrapegation sessions go beyond basic data and try to access transactions. Very few try to transfer money or pay a bill, the focus is elsewhere, on the data. Why people access this data could be a myriad of reasons from verifying trial deposits for a P2P service (they use the aggregators to verify these deposits) to actually pulling data into a Personal Financial Management(PFM) app, the reasons vary.”
- 93% Of End Users Also Use Internet Banking. “Most of the people who use the scrapegators also log in normal to mobile and Internet banking. They are getting SOME utility out of a third-party fintech app,” Malauzai stated. “But they also need to return to the bank or credit unions digital offering to perform core transactions and get expanded data. But some, the 7%-10%, never go to their bank’s/CU’s website. They have moved away and are getting more value from someone else.”
- Mint, Yodlee & Intuit The Big Three. “There are dozens of scrapegators accessing Internet banking. The big three by volume are Mint, Yodlee and Intuit,” the Monkey Insights report states. “Mint is the only top vendor who actually has its own fintech app, all of the other scrapegators are truly aggregators, in that they are scraping and passing data on to another fintech vendor. Other notables in this list include Plaid, Finicity and Finovera.”
- Transaction Failure Rates are High – 5% – 7%. “The scripts the scrapegators build break. Then they can’t scrape anymore,” Malauzai said. “We can tell when a script fails. Approximately 5% – 7%% of all inquiries fail because of basic reasons like the screens have changed or sessions have timed out. For banks and credit unions with flexible Internet sites, this is a problem as it is easy for them to change, and change they do, thus breaking the scripts. Yes, some aggregators use APIs to access data but this is a vast minimum of the data they represent, so the focus is Scraping.”