Are there any concerns about automatic bank feeds into accounting systems?

yb2019

It feels risky to allow such links, in light of all we have heard about security (or lack of) in banking systems and in the internet in general. Has anyone heard of incidents, or is everyone happy to trust this system?

KoopaCooper

I think it's one of those cases where everybody is happy to trust in the safety and security of the new system until or unless it proves it cannot be trusted.

Case in point from outside the world of accounting: In Scouting, a few years ago now, they rolled out this new system called Compass - it was going to be the next big thing in Scouting, a nationwide database of every member, adult and child; a centralised system for storing everyone's personal data and updating children's records from anywhere, etc etc...It was only when they rolled out the beta version nation-wide that someone discovered a major flaw in the code.

Anybody, anywhere in the country and with any level of permission, doing a search for someone in their own Scout Group, would turn up results from across the country of everybody with the same name as their search parameter. This was obviously a huge security breach, and the system was discontinued for storing children's records until such time as the nature of the breach could be discovered in the code and fixed.
(It never was fully fixed, so the system has never been fully re-implemented. It's still used for storing adult records though because bizarrely the breach only affected the children's records. *shrug*)

Everybody in the movement was quite happy for it to be the Next Big Thing in Scouting software...but as soon as the flaw was discovered, it was dropped like a lead balloon, barely heard of again.

Live bank feeds will be the same I think - the Next Big Thing in online accounting, but if anyone happens to discover a bug that lets hackers in, the whole bank feed system would probably vanish without a trace in days.