Why developers are switching to Realize for linking investment accounts
Incumbent aggregators like Plaid have failed to deliver a high-quality API for linking investment accounts. Learn how Realize is filling this gap in the aggregation market.
What are investment account APIs and why do they matter?
Investments APIs allow people to securely link investment accounts to products and services that leverage account data or functionality in powerful ways. For example, you can receive a risk-assessment of your portfolio by linking brokerage accounts to a portfolio analysis app that analyzes your positions data.
These APIs act as the backbone for products that rely on account data to help people do things like visualize their investments in one spot or calculate their taxes.
A brief history of this space
Prior to Realize, developers had to choose from a handful of aggregators: Plaid, Yodlee, MX, and Finicity. Yodlee is the OG in this space, having operated since 1999.
Newer players like Plaid emerged in the 2010’s, but to date have been primarily focused on their banking connections. There hasn’t been much innovation on the investment accounts side for many years (ask anyone who has used them).
These investment account connections are really bad - it is commonplace for there to be major outages that disconnect accounts or prevent them from even being linked. On top of that, data is only pulled every 12 hours (and it’s often inaccurate).
The problem with these existing solutions is that they've built their businesses on an approach called "screen-scraping", where they go to a brokerage's website, log in as a user, and then pull whatever data is available on the page. This approach is unreliable because the websites that they are scraping are frequently changed without notice, which results in breaking changes.
How Realize solves these problems
“Our customers are able to pull account data in real-time, keep accounts connected, and access far more data.”
We never screen-scrape. In order to provide customers with the highest quality connections, we take a challenging but more robust approach.
All of our integrations leverage APIs used by the brokerages themselves. We connect with these APIs through either an OAuth 2.0 connection or by reverse-engineering private APIs (the same ones used by the brokerages’ mobile apps).
The result? Our customers are able to:
Pull account data in real-time
Connect accounts at any time
Maintain account connections
Access far more data (Plaid provides data from the past 90 days… we provide data from the past 15 years!)
Allow users to execute orders in their accounts.
Let’s go even deeper
Curious about how bad these other aggregators are when it comes to investment account data? Here’s a non-exhaustive list of issues that our customers experienced when they were using Plaid:
Plaid does not represent dividend reinvestments correctly and consistently across brokerages
Plaid often reports incorrect or null quantities, prices, cost_basis for holdings and transactions
Plaid provides incorrect, inconsistent, outdated ticker symbols, names, types, currencies for securities
Plaid duplicates transactions or misses them completely
Plaid sometimes represents option quantities as numbers of contracts and sometimes as number of shares
Plaid doesn't return option events
Plaid doesn’t adjust for stock splits
Plaid doesn’t provide the time of a transaction, only a date
Plaid only pulls data every 12 hours
Plaid often disconnects accounts
How does this compare to Realize?
Realize handles everything above!
Realize allows you to access the raw payloads directly from the brokerages so that you can extract all the information that you need (don’t worry, we standardize everything as well)
Realize provides all account data in real-time
Realize maintains a long-lived session for users accounts (keeps them connected)
A new competitive advantage
When someone links their investment accounts to your product, they are expecting the connections to work and the data to always be up to date and accurate.
Companies switching to Realize have a major advantage over their competitors that use another aggregator - they can now pull data whenever a user wants it (instead of every 12 hours, reduce churn by keeping accounts connected, and provide better features as they have access to more data and functionality.
Want to learn more?
Here are some helpful resources: