BOA decision "surprising;" customers assure
updated 05:05 pm EST, Wed January 30, 2002
In response to claims made by the Bank of America regarding the dropping support of Macintosh users, Intuit, maker of Quicken, has clarified its position on the issue noting that Mac Quicken users will still be able to take advantage of the BOA service.
Citing changes in their online banking platform, Bank of America notified
their customers that it would no longer support direct connect to Macintosh
versions of Quicken. According to a subsequent statement , Bank of America is
claiming that they are taking this functionality away from more than 1,100
Quicken for Mac users is because of the inability to set up recurring payments
in Quicken. This is surprising for three reasons:
(1) In Quicken '98, (released in September 1997), we added the ability to
schedule payments. Through this functionality, Quicken customers are able to
schedule payments - including recurring bills like mortgage and car payments -
to be made on specified future dates.
(2) Bank of America has supported payments through direct connect in Quicken
since Quicken '98.
(3) From September 1997 through the recent beta testing process for the
implementation of Bank of America's new payment method, the lack of recurring
payment feature was never mentioned by B of A as a reason for incompatibility.
Through extensive customer research, we have found that the ability to
schedule payments has received high approval marks. Our customers are not
requesting the ability to set up recurring payments, which is a very similar
feature. If at a future date, our customers tell us that they want recurring
payment functionality, we will do what we can to implement it.
Despite Bank of America's decision, customers will still be able to download
transactions from Bank of America via Web Connect by going to the bank's Web
Site and downloading transactions into Quicken. Customers can also continue to
pay bills on Bank of America's Web Site or use "Quicken Bill Pay," a service
that enables customers to pay any bill from any financial institution in the
United States and from up to ten different accounts (even at multiple
financial institutions).
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Apr 2000
Partial Solution
This has already been pointed out to be a partial solution, and does NOT contradict what BoA reported. Customers are still losing the ability to pull transactions from within Quicken. Research that I have done still shows that this is not the fault of Intuit, but was a decision of the bank. The interface that Quicken uses to communicate via both Mac and PC is exactly the same. The deciding factor of whether BoA will support the request is entirely a field in the interface spec which reports the client platform. Do not flame Intuit for this, this is based 100% on the implementation of the Interface spec that BoA is creating.