Less than 18 months after acquiring Yodlee, Envestnet has fully integrated the data aggregator’s technology into its platform. This means that financial advisers using Envestnet will now have a complete 360-degree view of their customers’ overall financial health.

John Bird, VP of product marketing for Envestnet | Yodlee, pointed out that it can be difficult for advisers to get the traditional and non-traditional financial data they need in order to provide the best possible service to their clients. “With the new integration of the Envestnet | Yodlee platform and the Envestnet platform,” he said, “we have leapfrogged the marketplace and are giving the advising community the most complete picture of their customers’ financial situation in a way that no other offering can.”

The integrated platform, including FastLink, also provides advisers with Envestnet’s reconciliation process. This feature is incorporated into Yodlee’s aggregation workflow to ensure that clients and their advisers are working with the most accurate, up-to-date data. Additionally, advisers will be able to access Envestnet’s alerting framework, as well as build their own applications using the platform’s open API.

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, Yodlee was acquired by Envestnet in the summer of 2015 for $660 million. A veteran of both FinDEVr and Finovate conferences—and a Best of Show winner from FinovateAsia 2013)—the company participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016, earlier this month, with a presentation titled “Fast Track API Integration with Envestnet | Yodlee.”

What are reliable credit assessments made of? These days the answer could be anything from FICO scores to feedback from social media activity on LinkedIn or Facebook. And while Terry McKeown, practice manager of credit analytics at Envestnet | Yodlee, finds some of the newer approaches to risk and credit assessment novel—and in some instances worth pursuing—his expert opinion is to to keep all eyes on the prize: the borrower’s ability to repay the amount borrowed and a track record of making those payments consistently.

“I’m a big fan of the foundations of credit,” McKeown said in a telephone conversation last week, harkening back to the days when lending discussions took place over a desk in an office rather than over the internet. Besides traditional credit-bureau data, he sees interesting potential in alternative and nontraditional data such as checking-account transactions and utility-bill payments when it comes to risk assessment, especially for those with short or even nonexistent credit histories. Populations with slim to invisible histories include millennials, immigrants, the elderly, the unbanked and underbanked. McKeown also sees value in examining traditional data in nontraditional ways, such as using checking account or mobile wallet payment data as a guide to a borrower’s consistency when it comes to paying bills. “This data can show both income stability as well as income verification by way of direct deposit,” he explained.

Other data alternatives he finds interesting include using LinkedIn to verify employment history and patterns, reviewing milestones in a Facebook profile for potential life changes, or perusing the Yelp reviews of a small business person seeking a loan. That said, McKeown sees many of these alternative metrics as still works-in-progress, saying that while they are “incredibly insightful,” many of these approaches are still very much “in early stages from an analytic standpoint.”

The interest in alternative credit and risk assessment becomes more important as the availability of new forms of data (including new technologies to access that data) converges with financial institutions determined to “catch up” with their increasingly mobile, increasingly young, potential customer base. “It’s been very much an education,” McKeown said, pointing out that millennials have different needs compared to, for example, those of gen-Xers when they were the same age.  The upshot: Traditional credit-bureau data becomes less relevant owing to data viewed at a summarized level and not being updated daily as is the transaction-level data that Envestnet | Yodlee provides.

So what’s the solution? McKeown points to two key dynamics: creative engagement and higher expectations. For McKeown, millennials—and to an extent other underbanked communities—”want a partner in their finances that thinks and behaves like them.” This means everything from meeting the customer on their channel (or channels) of choice to greater flexibility and understanding when it comes to matching customers with products. This also means that FIs need to be ready to do more to meet the changing expectations of their potentially less patient, more technologically savvy clientele. “Millennials expect to have real-time pricing information based on real-time data available at the click of a mouse or via their mobile device,” McKeown said. “They expect an intuitive, simplified application process, whether it is delivered in person or over the Internet, or through a phone app.”

That said, the key to attracting and better engaging with millennials is less a technological challenge and more a cultural one, as McKeown sees it. “Problems with accurately credit-scoring people in their 20s and early 30s [are] nothing new,” he says. What is new is a generation that is simultaneously more free and more connected than its predecessors, giving financial services professionals both new challenges and new opportunities when it comes to engaging both “America’s largest generation” and the underbanked alike.

About Envestnet | Yodlee

Envestnet acquired multiple Best of Show winner Yodlee for $680 million almost one year ago. The company announced a strategic partnership with United Capital earlier this month, in which the company’s data-aggregation technology will support United Capital’s FlexScore solution. FlexScore, a Finovate alum, was acquired by United Capital in February. More than 1,000 firms, including more than half of the 20 biggest banks use Envestnet | Yodlee’s platform to drive apps for millions of customers around the world.

Envestnet | Yodlee’s data-aggregation technology will power United Capital’s FlexScore solution. And yes, that’s the same Finovate alum—FlexScore—that was acquired by United Capital earlier this year.

“By delivering innovative financial planning solutions and new data-driven insights, our partnership will empower FlexScore users to take control of their financial destiny,” Envestnet | Yodlee VP Julie Solomon said. As United Capital’s primary account data-aggregation partner, Envestnet | Yodlee will securely link users’ financial accounts and seamlessly onboard customers while aggregating the necessary data to generate each user’s individual financial health rating or FlexScore.

The FlexScores eventually will be offered as part of FinLifePartners, United Capital’s white-label advisory platform for independent advisers.

“Our business has helped transform the traditional wealth-management industry,” United Capital Head of Platform Mike Capelle said. “For us to continue innovating and benefiting customers, we needed a proven data-aggregation partner that could provide the tools our customers need to take control of their financial lives.”

United Capital is one of the fasted growing RIAs in the country. The firm has $16 billion in assets under management and more than 80 offices in the U.S. When the acquisition was announced in February, United Capital’s CEO called FlexScore “the missing piece” and anticipated that the technology would be used “to help promote customer engagement with retirement plans.”

In acquiring Yodlee just over a year ago for $680 million, Bill Crager, Envestnet president, said he hoped the addition would make it easier for Envestnet to ink deals with independent and smaller financial advisers unaffiliated with the larger firms such as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. The company’s new strategic partnership with United Capital is a big step in this direction.

Headquartered in Redwood City, California, and with offices in London and Bangalore, India, Envestnet | Yodlee provides data aggregation and analytics to more than 1,000 companies, including 11 of the top 20 U.S. banks. The company trades on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “ENV” and has a market capitalization of $1.6 billion. Yodlee, which went public a year before being acquired by Envestnet, demonstrated its latest technology at FinovateSpring 2016.