When a bank will not connect

The first hard stop most people meet. It is usually one of three things, and they need different answers.

It is not in the search results

Search runs across roughly thirteen thousand institutions, matching on the name as the provider records it — which is not always the name on your card.

Try a shorter search first. SageFin says as much when nothing matches, and it is the fix more often than it sounds: a bank filed as First National Bank of Somewhere will not answer to the full name of its credit card, and three or four letters of the distinctive word finds it where the whole string does not.

If it genuinely is not there, you have two good options and one worth knowing about:

• Add it by hand. A manual account is a real account here — it counts in your net worth, your budgets and your reports. It simply does not update itself. More about accounts you keep yourself.
• Import a file. If your bank exports CSV, you can bring the history in and keep it current the same way.
• Tell us. Which institution, and the name you searched for. Coverage differs between data providers, and a bank that is missing today is sometimes reachable by another route.

It is listed, but it refuses

You reach your bank's own sign-in and it will not let the connection through.

Some banks require you to approve the connection from inside their site. Look for a connected apps, third-party access or data sharing page in your online banking, approve SageFin's data provider there, and try again. Until that is done the bank will keep declining, and nothing on our side can change it.

Some ask for a code every time. That is the bank's policy rather than a fault, and it will ask again on each reconnection.

Some are simply down. If the failure mentions the institution being unavailable, it is usually worth trying the next day before doing anything else.

It connects, and brings nothing back

The connection succeeds and the account appears empty, or with a balance and no transactions.

Give it a few minutes. Balances arrive with the connection; transactions follow, and on a first connection there can be a lot of them.

Then check what the bank actually shares. Not every institution offers every kind of data — a bank may hand over balances and no transaction history, or accounts of one type and not another. A data provider listing a product for an institution is a claim about what is possible there, not a promise about your account; we have watched a major bank list investment data and deliver none of it.

If a whole category of your account is missing rather than being late, that is usually why, and it is not something reconnecting fixes.

It worked before and stopped

Different problem, different page — when an account stops updating covers re-authorization, which is the common case and is not a fault.

Still stuck

Help & Support → Contact Support, which sends the page you were on and the version you were running. The two useful details to add are the institution's name and what the screen said.