Welcome to FastLink 4

What an eventful summer, with several new Yodlee products shipping to customers! Now we’ve put the finishing touches on a major new release of FastLink. For developers new to Yodlee, FastLink is the essential tool for bringing consumers’ online financial accounts to the Yodlee platform.

This latest upgrade to our “account linking” tool brings many welcome features. The summary is a contemporary mobile-first user interface, big improvements in error messages, and a rewrite of the companion styling tool to support extensive FastLink customization.

There’s also a policy change. A few fearless developers used our APIs to write their own custom apps to onboard consumer accounts. Now that the developer can style nearly everything the consumer sees in FastLink, the policy is “no more onboarding through API calls”. FastLink is the only supported way to onboard consumers. Let’s review the improvements.

Mobile first

This has been a sensible IT policy for a while, and we’ve extended it to FastLink. We now offer detailed guidance on invoking FastLink on three popular mobile platforms: iOS, Android, and React Native. A fourth, Flutter, will follow soon. FastLink itself uses a responsive design (adjusting the placement of UI elements to fit the screen size correctly). To learn more about mobile integration, including links to example applications, follow this link.

Error messages

FastLink 4.0 now provides more meaningful error messages for you, the developer, and your end user. Errors have been classified into one of 7 categories, helping with consistency and coverage. The categories include login errors, server errors, session errors, deep link errors, and so on. A sample error response looks like this JSON snippet:

{
    "code": "E701",
    "title": "INVALID_PARAMETER_OR_VALUE",
    "message": "Invalid value for providerId",
    "action": "exit",
    "fnToCall": "errorHandler"
}

Jump to Error Handling page for detailed documentation.

Styling tool

We completely rewrote the styling tool and updated it so that the developer can easily change the appearance or style of just about everything that is visible in FastLink 4. We think you’ll like this and find it easy to use. Try out the interactive demo or launch the tool via the buttons in your dashboard's "API URLs" section.

Migrating from FastLink 3.0

Users of FastLink 3.0 can find instructions for moving to FastLink 4.0 in this guide.

Other Details

What else? There are several other things to know. Only developer accounts using "client credential” authentication can use FastLink 4. People using JWTs to authenticate will have to move their developer account and app to use client credentials instead. That’s a quick and easy process. You can read more about it in Moving from JSON Web Tokens to Client Credentials blog post.

FastLink 4.0 currently supports linking to US regional institutions and does not support US Open Banking. We anticipate rolling out integration with both toward the end of 2020. The United Kingdom Open Banking is slated for early 2021.