Summary

Financial institutions doing business online ought to have a “token” for users to provide to financial aggregators.

Online Business

Nearly all financial institutions have online services these days. These all require users to authenticate and authorize in some flavor. This allows users to be able to view and manage funds at that institution.

Consumer Variety

Many people have more than one institution that holds some financial assets or liabilities for various reasons. For that reason, many users use aggregation services: e.g. Mint, Empower (formerly PersonalCapital), etc.

The Feature

It seems a good idea to me that more financial institutions should provide users the ability to generate and consume “tokens” for their accounts. The idea is similar in nature to GitHub’s more specific “personal access tokens.” The users then provide these tokens to financial institutions in place of their online credentials. This way, when the various institutions have data breaching incidents, the users have to worry less about the exposure of their credentials from all the financial institutions connected to that data breach.