Managing My ING Account with Fidelity Fullview: Mission Impossible?

I have a Yodlee account for a while, but never linked any of my personal account with it. The reason is simple: I am not 100% confident to give all my account numbers, user IDs, and passwords to a company I had no relationship of any kind with, though they seems to be quite popular. Instead, I use Fidelity Fullview, a service that, ironically, is provided by Yodlee! I thought since Fidelity is a well-established company with good reputation, it may be a little bit easier to deal with should anything happen. I know this is not a strong argument, but that's the way how I use Yodlee, through a middle man I can trust.

Anyway, I had my INGDirect account, among other bank, brokerage, loan, credit card, and mutual fund accounts, set up at Fullview, and it was indeed very easy to use. With one click, I can see the latest transactions and balances of all the accounts, though I use the service only a couple of times the most in any month. The connection between my ING account and Fullview started to give me "Incorrect Login Information" since ING rolled out their latest features, including associating my account with a phrase and an image, and some other security questions. I guess I selected 3 that I thought I could easily come up with the answer if the question is presented. And that's exactly the problem: if the question is presented.

Though the connection has been down for a while, I didn't try to fix it until last night. Then I faced an even bigger challenge:

I have no idea which questions I have selected a couple of months ago and definitely don't have answers to all of them. After a couple of failed attempts, I eventually gave up. While I appreciate the measures financial institutions have taken to make sure their customer's accounts are secure, it could be quite a burden to remember not just passwords of dozens of accounts, but also multiple questions/answers associated with each account. If only my home computer is used to access my accounts, I probably won't be bothered by the security questions as the system remembered which computer I used during registration and that is not going to help me keep the answers in my mind. When one day I have to use another computer to access account, it could be long, long process if I am presented with 13 questions and forget which one to answer.

Is there any simple way to avoid the potential headache?

If you enjoyed reading this post, please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed (What's RSS feed?). Or you can also choose to have free daily updates delivered right to your inbox.

Featured Financial Products

• Buy stocks at TradeKing at a flat $4.95 commission per trade. Check out the TradeKing review and use these TradeKing promotion codes to open an account.
• Get the most out of your money with these online banks that pay top interest rates: EverBank: 4.75% APY, FNBO Direct: 3.50% APY, WTDirect: 3.31% APY.

Related Articles You Don't Want To Miss

• Fidelity to Reopen Magellan Fund to New Investors
• Fidelity 529 College Rewards American Express Card $25 Bonus
• Changes to Fidelity UNIQUE College Investing Plan
• Calling the Change “Exciting,” FIA(?) to Terminate Fidelity 529 College Rewards MasterCard
• Now I’m Done