I’ve been trying HSBC Connected Money, Yolt, and Emma for a couple of weeks now.
Some thoughts below. Overall, Emma is the one I like most. This is even though it does not support all my banks whilst Yolt does.
HSBC:
- Doesn’t support Monzo (so basically DOA)
- Of the three it seems to be least reliable in connecting to my banks - sometimes will get an unable to authenticate error for a bank.
- However I do like that when you click on a transaction you can see similar prior transactions (similar to Monzo transaction history when you click on a transaction in Monzo). Neither Yolt nor Emma seem to have this.
Yolt & Emma:
- Both support Monzo.
- Yolt supports a much larger set of banks (including all of my banks). Furthermore, Yolt is the only one of the 3 to have added support for open banking APIs from some legacy banks, so appears to be fastest moving in this area.
- Syncing seems quicker in Emma and background sync seems more up-to-date.
- I prefer the way the transactions list is formatted in Emma. In particular, superior use of icons in Emma makes it easier to identify certain categories of transactions at-a-glance (such as Excluded transactions and Investments). Emma also seems better at parsing merchant names from transaction data provided by the banks.
- I prefer Emma’s recurring payments feature to Yolt’s track bills feature because Emma provides an indication of whether a particular payments has changed from the previous month.
- I was originally a bit put off by Emma’s cartoonish interface, but I’ve come to like it and prefer it to Yolt’s interface.
I see myself sticking with Emma - especially when it adds support for my last bank. But excluding Connected Money and Yolt, does anyone prefer a different account aggregation app over Emma? Might give it a try.