T. Rowe Price has joined the parade of fund companies offering account aggregation services to clients. The Baltimore-based company tapped Yodlee to provide a private-label version of its service called AccountMinder. The service now appears on TRowePrice.com.

Aggregation services pull-together multiple account data in one location on the Web for users. The Yodlee service uses a technology called "screen-scraping." Under this method the customer provides account information and passwords and Yodlee's engine then scrapes each Web site to gather the data. That information is then displayed in one location. Screen-scraping has been critized as providing relatively shallow and unreliable data.

As aggregation services have evolved a number of firms, such as ByAllAccounts.com, have struck agreements with firm's holding client date to provide deeper and more meaningful information.

Both Fidelity and Vanguard have taken steps to take the process one step further. Each firm is working on integrating its aggregation services with investment advice tools. Vanguard is integrating its tools with portfolio allocation tools provided by Financial Engines. Fidelity is wrapping its Portfolio Planner tool into its aggregation service.  

Stay ahead of the news ... Sign up for our email alerts now
CLICK HERE