Is Personal Capital Safe ??

[pn3069]

I have been using Personal Capital for some time now but occasionally I get paranoid about all my login credentials being available to the third party (Yodlee I think) Personal Capital uses.

I do not include my bank accounts since they have cash - I only include brokerage accounts with the hope that turning my investments into cash (by a hacker) and getting that cash out of them to a *new* address/account may have some hurdles.

What are your thoughts? If you don't use Personal Capital, what other tool do you use? [ Please don't say complicated excel sheets -- I am tired of them and want a simple tool that can import transactions and display various aspects of my portfolio.]

Thanks in advance for staying on topic.

 

[nash031]

Read here.

Is Personal Capital Safe?

Because you are providing a lot of sensitive financial information, you want to know the answer to the question, “Is Personal Capital safe?” The reality is that Personal Capital is quite safe. Harris, has more than two decades of experience in the financial technology sector, and has been involved with security. As a result, there is high emphasis on security. In fact, Fritz Robbins, the CTO of Personal Capital, likes to point out that it’s probably safer to use Personal Capital to monitor your financial transactions and accounts than it is to log in repeatedly to different institutions.

The encryption used by Personal Capital is top-notch, and Robbins says that information isn’t sent through your browser, so even when your computer is compromised, your passwords aren’t. Personal Capital uses Yodlee for data collection and management. Yodlee is considered the leader in the field. (You can read my interview with Robbins, regarding Personal Capital’s security, on InvestorJunkie.)

Additionally, you can’t actually initiate transactions from Personal Capital, so if someone actually made it into your account, s/he couldn’t move any of your money around.

In addition, all of my financial institutions require either two-factor authentication or security questions for logins from new locations. Even if someone hacked Yodlee and got the credentials available to PC, they would not be able to log in to any of my financial institutions without me at least knowing about it, and they likely wouldn't be able to at all. I agree with the CTO's comment about PC being safer than logging in to your bank and/or investment institution every day, particularly from public or hotel WIFI.

I've used PC for about three years now, and feel quite safe though I admit I was skeptical at first.