Data Integration 101

What is A Financial Data Provider?

A financial data provider is an institution (like a custodian, bank, investment firm, or financial service provider) that holds and manages financial data on behalf of clients. These institutions maintain records of transactions, account balances, holdings, and other financial data related to their clients and their accounts.

What is a Financial Data Aggregator?

A financial data aggregator, like ByAllAccounts, is a data and technology provider that offers account aggregation capabilities to financial institutions, wealth management first and financial technology providers to embed within their platform or application. The aggregator continuously maintains connectivity to a large network of data source (i.e. financial institutions, custodians, cypto exchanges, ,etc.) After the user permissions the data, the aggregator collects and consolidates data from various sources into a unified format, and delivers the data to their customers. The financial data aggregator can either be generalists or specialize in data that is specific to certain industries or use cases (e.g. wealth management vs. payments).

What is a Data Integration Service?

In the context of financial data aggregation, a data integration service refers to the integration of a new financial data provider's data feed into an aggregation platform to enable the secure transfer, translation, and consolidation of financial account data from that provider to the aggregator's downstream distribution network. Once integrated, aggregated data from the provider is made available to authorized financial professionals, such as Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) to access in their wealth reporting platform of choice.