Spring Cleaning in 2020

April/May is the traditional time of year to scrub the floors, dust the mantelpiece, and hose down the garden furniture ready for summer.   We at Yodlee have been doing similar software spring cleaning to improve our customers' experience.  Read on for a description of some of the improvements, large and small.

Yodlee rolled out a new software release in March, and this went live on the Developer Portal on April 2.  The evening of April 2 2020 is thus a watershed.  Developers who registered their account prior to the evening of April 2 are given an issuer id and a private RSA for use creating a JSON Web Token (JWT) for authentication.  Developers who registered their account after that date are given a client id and client secret, for use in the new, simpler authentication scheme, which is the "client credential grant" flow of the RFC6749 authentication standard.   Most developers like the new authentication approach, because you acquire an authorization token simply by asking for it with an API call.  If you're not sure what authentication approach you're supposed to use, login to your Yodlee developer account, and look at the credentials Yodlee gave you.  If there is an issuer-id, you are using JWTs. If there is a client-id, you're using the new client credential scheme.  We're currently devising an upgrade strategy, to help all developers have the benefit of authenticating this way.  Stay tuned for further news.

Probably the biggest improvement to the developer portal is our new quickstart guide.  This can be reached from the menu at the top of every page on the portal.  It takes you to a landing page with the top half devoted to marketing news about aggregation and account verification.  I put a button just above that, allowing developers to skip right to the lower half of the page with the coding information.  The quickstart guide contains 3 short videos explaining the Yodlee Platform and the products.   You can then proceed to a guided trail based on the very popular Postman API test tool.  Even if you have never used Postman before, you'll be able to follow along, and make your first API call within 10 minutes or so.  That gives you a rich insight into the data Yodlee works with, and how to bring it into your app.  From there, you can go on to do a complete account data verification, or add an account using the browser-based app we call "FastLink".   We're hearing from early testers that they really like the Quickstart experience.

The April 2 release also features "implicit user registration" for developers using client credential authentication.  Under the former approach, you had to register a user and provide certain data, before you could create a token for that user (needed for data access).   With implicit user registration, you no longer need to register a new user explicitly.  The act of asking for a token for a user-id that Yodlee has not seen before, will cause the new user to be registered and then the access token handed to you.  You can later add more details to the end user data if you want.  Yodlee no longer requires an end user email address for a new user, so you may not need to add anything if you don't care to.

We did other spring cleaning, but these are the most visible items.  You can find a list of all product enhancements in the release notes, here and here.   Let me leave you with a fun fact about Victorian poet (born 1885) T.S. Eliot.   Eliot wrote the material that Andrew Lloyd Webber's Broadway smash hit musical Cats was based on!  Eliot's work is a bit, well, nihilistic, but he did write one whimsical work for his young godson.  And that's the set of poems Lloyd Webber plundered for his musical!