With major banks and Web portals joining the fray, he predicts the total will double by year's end and reach 8 million by 2004. This is going to be a mainstream offering, something most consumers do,'' says Brook Newcomb of Forrester Research. Other experts disagree, saying aggregation of financial information will be held in check by privacy and security concerns. If you want more, you need merely click through to the original site to view older transactions, transfer funds or read mail. No need to enter your usual password.
Aggregation also raises legal and competition issues.
Known as ''screen scrapers,'' aggregators typically don't get the permission of the banks or Web sites whose information they cull. Instead, customers provide aggregators with ID names and passwords to their personal accounts. More bare-bones, with only a handful of tools. But users can set up multiple profiles to look at things differently at different times. It lets users download information to Excel spreadsheets and gives financial advisers access to the numbers.