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Release Note: Speed or Security? Let’s Have Both!

By Flinks on March 7th, 2019

Reading Time: 2 min

Some people will try to make you believe that you can only do one of two things, go fast or be secure. We’re here to tell you: don’t settle for one, have both!

As days are (finally) getting longer, so is the list of improvements we released lately. This first product update for 2019 is pretty comprehensive. Ready? Let’s go!

What we released

Speed

We’ve been hard at work for the past few months with a special focus on speeding up the Authorize step — when your users connect with their bank account. The fast version of our Authorize process is getting closer and closer to what feels like a real-time response. Don’t blink, you might miss the action.

Our last product update featured speed improvements for TD Bank and Scotia Bank. This time around, we’re bringing improvement to:

  • RBC
  • BMO
  • CIBC
  • Desjardins
  • TD Bank and Scotia Bank — again? yes!
The average speed of a fast Authorize connection to a bank account is now under 12 seconds.
Getting there.

We also improved speed on the GetAccountsDetail step — which, as the name implies, retrieves data from a user bank account after the connection has been authorized. We sped up the process for:

  • BMO
  • CIBC
  • Desjardins

Security

If you read about our security strategy, then you know we’re pretty serious when it comes to protecting financial data. We added two new features to strengthen data security:

  • HMAC signature on webhook. This is basically a secret handshake just between us that proves the information you’re receiving is actually coming from Flinks.
  • New security layer using an authorize token on our API and iFrame. Token based authorization is a way to filter calls by adding a security checkpoint.

Need help setting up these features? Contact us!

Other improvements

If you’re anything like us, you love when things are done right the first time around so you don’t have to think about it afterwards. Flinks Connect now allows your users to answer all their MFA security questions at once, so nothing stands in the way of refreshing data.

And to top everything off, Score users now have a more user-friendly experience when they access score results through our Portal. Because you deserve it.

What we’re working on

As winter is slowly wearing out, our dedication to speed up every single step remains strong. These are the changes and updates we will be working on:

Flinks Connect

  • Default redirectUrl
  • Account filter currency

API

  • Authorize token on the Portal
  • GetAccountsDetails Speed for Scotia Bank
  • GetAccountsDetails Speed for TD Bank

P.S. If you want to stay up to date on our releases in-between Release Notes, you can check out our full Changelog.

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