Egg Money Manager !

MikeLB

Maybe not totally relevant but one of the best things I ever did to get on top of my credit cards and keep track of my finances was install Egg Money Manager onto my PC.

If there is a thread about this somewhere please forgive the Newbie!

Obviously you need some sort of Egg account to use this service. But basically it lets you access all your online accounts on one web page by use of a Password Safe stored on your PC.

Okay, not exciting so far, but there is an excellent little trick you can pull off if you have an Egg Card.

You can transfer money between the registered accounts, and also make extra 'One Off Payments' to your Egg Card from your registered Current Accounts. And you can do this as much as you like with no penalty.

Now i know you can make extra payments on all Credit Cards. But who realistically is going to send off a cheque for £1.50 to their credit card company, or make a £2.76 payment over the phone. But if its online, it just seems okay to do it.

What I did over a number of months was make ridiculous small payments whenever I literally had a spare £1.50 in the bank.This was on top of the standard monthly payment I did this almost every couple of days. Whenever my bank balance stood at say £27.35, I would pay £2.35 to Egg, leaving myself a nice round £25 to play with in the bank. This rounding down prinicple has really served me well over the years with extra payments.

I am sure you can probably do this with other online services, but my Egg experience did help me loads.

Anyone else done anything similar?

Woby_Tide

just make sure that you are covered for fraud protection by your bank if you use the money manager. Some banks specifically exclude any fraud claims if they find you have stored your access details in software such as Egg Money Manger

servalan

I also use egg money manager and think its great . I can keep a track of everything in one place. The site is secure and easy to use.

Altarf

Woby_Tide wrote:

just make sure that you are covered for fraud protection by your bank if you use the money manager. Some banks specifically exclude any fraud claims if they find you have stored your access details in software such as Egg Money Manger

Could you give a specific example of such a bank.

Juni_3

I used Egg Money Manager for a few days until I thought about the implications of entering the means to access my bank account into a computer program.

I've got 12 different internet accounts and they all prohibit me in the small print from passing my passwords onto anyone else. In my view entering these details into a 3rd party program would constitute a breach of that.

Woby_Tide

Altarf wrote:

Could you give a specific example of such a bank.

Cahoot Clause 11 (And also I'm guessing Abbey)
http://www.cahoot.co.uk/terms/terms.html

Royal Bank of Scotland (And also I guess Halifax)
http://www.rbs.co.uk/Personal_Finances/Bank_Online/FAQs/security.htm#What%20about%20Account%20Aggregation

Edit:

Alliance & Leicester
http://www.alliance-leicester.co.uk/internetbanking/index.asp?page=fraud-email&ct=ibmenu


http://www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk/index.php?category_id=191
Legal issues in account aggregation
According to the Financial Services Authority, account aggregation is neither an "authorisable activity" nor a "financial promotion” and is therefore not regulated. There are, however, several areas of the criminal and civil law that apply.
The main civil issue is whether a customer breaches a contract with a service provider (e.g. a bank) by disclosing account access data (e.g. username, PIN) to an aggregator. Legal opinion is that the customer is likely to be protected under the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 and the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999, and is only liable for £50 of a disputed transaction in the absence of fraud.
The main criminal law issue is whether the aggregator is committing a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (i.e. hacking). The advantage of user-driven aggregation is that it avoids most of the potential legal pitfalls that attend screen scraping.
Citibank claims to have circumvented the computer misuse issue by holding all confidential customer access data in a digital safe on its own server and abandoning automatic updating. Account data refreshment is performed by the customer.

http://www.bba.org.uk/bba/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=349&a=5372
Account aggregation services

12.13 If you use an account aggregation service, you may be liable for any fraud or mistakes that happen on your accounts as a result.

http://www.fsa.gov.uk/consumer/updates/updates/e_commerce/mn_aggregation.html
The Financial Services Authority does not regulate the provision of account aggregation services. You may not have access to the Financial Ombudsman Service or the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

Abbey
http://www.abbey.com/index/cash/current_accounts_index/current_account/abbey_account_index/abbey_account_t-and-c.htm

Northern Bank
If You use an account aggregation service (which is a service which allows You to obtain details of all Your on-line accounts (whether such accounts are with Us or otherwise) and other information from one website (which website does not form part of the Internet Banking Service)), You will be in breach of Clause 12 of these Terms and Conditions (and possibly also other terms and conditions which apply to Your Account). You may therefore be liable for any fraud or mistakes that happen on Your accounts as a result. We will not be liable for any such fraud or mistakes.

Nationwide
Peter O'Hea: What is Nationwide's current position on the use of third party account aggregation services (such as Egg Money Manager) by Society members to view and organise their e-savings accounts?

Bernard replies: We have not satisfied ourselves with the security of this service and will therefore not accept any liability for any loss that you may suffer from using this service. Our advice is not to disclose your sign on details to anyone, and to use https://www.nationwide.co.uk to access your Nationwide accounts.

HSBC/First Direct unless you use their own aggregation software(ummm so they want yo to use their software to do it but not someone elses...daft)

3.3.2 Nothing in this Clause prevents you from using the first direct internet banking plus service. However, if you use an account aggregation service that is not provided by an HSBC Group company you may be liable for any fraud or mistakes that happen on your account as a result.

snezhinskproject

And that, my friends, is going to have to be the end of my use Egg Money Manager, no matter how excellent it is and how much easier it makes my life.

Thanks for bringing the liability issues to our attention.

snezhinskproject

Further to my post above, I am really concerned by this. When I signed up for Egg Money Manager, what really put my mind at rest was the 'Egg Guarantee' concerning its use:

"We guarantee to repay you any money that is taken from your Egg Account or any third party account aggregated via Egg Money Manager if:

- the cause is an error by our staff or our systems; or
- the fraud or security breach is caused by Egg, an Egg company or one of our Linked Suppliers [...].

We will not be responsible for any losses if:

- the fraud or security breach is caused by a third party service provider (e.g. electronic wallet or aggregation service) which is not a Linked Supplier, or your use of that service;
- the fraud or security breach is the result of any indirect access to your Egg account (i.e. you did not enter your security details directly onto the Egg secure account log in page)
- you have acted fraudulently, without reasonable care or have not met the security requirements in the terms and conditions which apply to your Egg account(s)."

Sounds OK (although define 'reasonable care'). However, here are some selected extracts from the surprisingly-not-so-well-signposted Egg Money Manager terms & conditions, with my comments:

"3.1 By using your Egg Money Manager, you may be breaking the terms and conditions which govern the operation of your Accounts. One or more Organisations may require you to cease using your Egg Money Manager as a condition of you retaining your Accounts with them and, in the event of unauthorised access to your Accounts, they may refuse to reimburse you for your loss. You should contact us if any of these circumstances arise. [Not a promise by Egg to actually reimburse you.]

3.2 Unauthorised access to your Egg Security Login Information may result in unauthorised access to all your Accounts and not just your Egg accounts. This makes it very important that you follow our security procedures at all times. You will find them in the terms and conditions of your other Egg products. [Not a promise by Egg to actually reimburse you.]

3.3 Should you believe that there has been any unauthorised access or any unauthorised transaction affecting your Accounts or any of them as a result of your Egg Money Manager you should tell us immediately and provide us with reasonable assistance to investigate the position in accordance with our procedures. [Not a promise by Egg to actually reimburse you.]


4.3 You transact on your Accounts at your own risk. We will not be liable for any losses that you have on any Account if your Account is subject to unauthorised access or an unauthorised transaction unless that unauthorised access or unauthorised transaction is caused by our own negligence or fraud or the negligence or fraud of any sub-contractor we use. [Concrete promise by Egg actually not to reimburse you in many situations!]"

Take the following scenario: a hacker somehow gets into your computer, gets into the password safe, decrypts it and extracts the account details, and cleans out your accounts. In this case:

- the fraud/security breach is not strictly speaking an 'error' by Egg's staff/systems. They have failed to provide a 100% secure encryption service, but it is not what one would call an 'error'. Egg don't pay out?
- the fraud or security breach is not strictly 'caused' by Egg, but the hacker. Egg don't pay out?
- your account has been subject to unauthorised access, but that was not strictly 'caused' by Egg's negligence. 'Negligence' is a legal term and a certain amount of culpability is required on Egg's part to be 'negligent'. Again, they have not provided a 100% secure service, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have been negligent. Egg has excluded liability where it has not itself been negligent. Egg don't pay out?

This is really very worrying. I'm not pretending to be any kind of expert here, but to me all this reads like Egg are acknowledging that by using the Egg Money Manager Service you will be losing the protection of your bank against fraudulent use of your online banking service. They seem to be offering some kind of replacement assurance, but actually that assurance seems to be very limited.

I have removed all of my accounts from EMM immediately, and am writing to Egg for clarification. I'll let you all know what they say.

Anwen_2

I messaged Egg about this, because Smile (my current account) say I would be breaching the t&cs of their account to use EMM. Their response (I also asked if I would lose the £10 incentive if I remove the Smile account from EMM):

Egg would like to assure you that you?re covered under the Egg Guarantee for any third party fraudulent activity when using Egg Money Manager. This covers monetary loss for Egg and non-Egg Accounts accessed via Egg Money Manager.

Most terms and conditions require customers to keep their security details confidential and not to disclose them to anyone. By using this service you?re not disclosing your password to a third party; you?re simply having it encrypted and stored on your PC in your password safe. Your password never gets seen by Egg when this service logs you in.

You'll need to add and keep on at least one non-Egg account to qualify for the incentive.

MikeLB

But what must be remember is that your passwords etc are stored in a password safe programme on your PC, not on Egg's server. When you access Money Manager, it looks to your Password Safe on your PC for answers not to Egg. So you havent technically given your passwords to a 3rd party.

Juni_3

MikeLB wrote:

But what must be remember is that your passwords etc are stored in a password safe programme on your PC, not on Egg's server. When you access Money Manager, it looks to your Password Safe on your PC for answers not to Egg. So you havent technically given your passwords to a 3rd party.

But the fact that it is stored in a program that you don't have full control over means that you don't really know what is happening.

I would never ever store my bank passwords on a computer and I've worked in IT for 25 years.