MX vs Fidel: Which is best?
Heron doesn't offer account aggregation but 75% of our customers do leverage account aggregators in order to provide world-class financial services. We are often asked to recommend the best API to get bank transactions, so we want to share the feedback we hear on the different options.
Here we'll be comparing MX against Fidel. MX is best for connections for the banks they cover, while Fidel is stronger for real time rewards for credit cards. Here are the key differences.
The pros of MX are:
- Great coverage
However there are some drawbacks:
- More expensive than some of the other options
- Keeping connections live is a lot of work
And the benefits of Fidel are:
- Realtime data
- Live Merchant Category Codes
- Great for rewards
But again there are some drawbacks:
- Only works on card data
No account aggregator has perfect coverage and great connectivity. When selecting your first vendor, it probably makes sense to go for the one with the best coverage for your target population (coverage varies between business and consumer accounts). If all goes well and you end up building a big business you should be ready to build software to:
- Ask customers which institutions they want to connect to
- Route your customers to different account aggregators based on the institution they select
- Have a hierarchy e.g. MX, Fidel as a fallback, and Yodlee as a reserve
We specialize in normalizing and deriving insights from raw transaction data pulled from any aggregator. So if you would like tailored recommendations of what provider to choose, book a demo.