Basiq: Possible Basiq issues and solutions

PocketSmith offers CDR bank feeds in Australia via Basiq, who are an Accredited Data Recipient.

Basiq constantly monitors the overall quality of its feeds, and they post known issues on their status page, which is available at https://status.basiq.io.

This is the first place you should check to see whether there is a widespread issue affecting Basiq feeds in general, or a problem specific to your bank. If there is a problem, you can track the progress towards resolution from this page as well.

A second place to check out is the Rectification Schedule, which is a page maintained by the CDR governing bodies in Australia. This lists all implementation gaps for all banks - if you have quirks in your data, you might find the problem listed as associated with your bank in this list, with a target fix date.

Errors can come in two forms when you're authorising a Basiq feed. The first of these is an error from the bank, where the error is shown from within the bank's own website, before you're taken back to Basiq and PocketSmith.

This error might be the bank saying "This service is unavailable" (which Westpac sometimes displays), or "You have no accounts eligible for data sharing" (often an error Macquarie shows). Another form we see of this sort of error is when the bank claims to have sent a one-time passcode to you, but nothing ever arrives.

In these cases, though we can open up investigations with Basiq, it's usually only the bank who can resolve these problems. For this reason, we suggest that your first stop should be to call the bank. When you call the bank, be sure to request specifically to talk to someone who can help you with CDR open banking data sharing, so you have a better chance of getting through to someone who can help.

Note that in these cases, your feed within PocketSmith will continue to show as "unauthorised" as the authorisation flow was not able to complete successfully. This means you can retry authorisation as many times as you'd like, as these are often just temporary issues.

Potential solutions: try authorising again, talk to your bank about the issue, try add a Yodlee bank feed.

If you receive an error from Basiq when you're authorising, such as an "Invalid token" or "Service unavailable" error within the popup either before you're sent to the bank's own interface, or after you return from your bank back to Basiq, then it's something that Basiq will need to resolve - we'll open up a ticket with Basiq to get them to investigate.

In the vast majority of cases, the problem is due to the bank returning some sort of error or something else unexpected to Basiq within the request. We'll work with Basiq to try get this sort of error figured out.

Like the above, your feed in PocketSmith will show as "unauthorised" when Basiq throws an error, as the authorisation flow was not able to complete. Please feel free to retry authorisation as many times as you'd like, as this might have just been a temporary issue.

Potential solutions: try authorising again, try adding a traditional Yodlee bank feed.

This sort of error occurs when you've successfully stepped through the authorisation flow with the bank and Basiq, and returned to PocketSmith. The feed might have been syncing successfully previously, but now has fallen into the "Error with data provider Basiq" state.

Usually this means that something went wrong with Basiq trying to talk to the bank about your feed connection, and some error was thrown when gathering accounts and transactions. In essence, your authorisation has worked successfully, but Basiq aren't able to gather your accounts and transactions.

If your connection has previously synced successfully and brought in transactions, this is very frequently a temporary issue with the bank, which will soon pass. Please use the "try again" button within the bank feed to attempt to sync the connection again after a few hours, or the following day.

If however, the connection has never synced before, then it's unlikely that the "try again" button will cause the feed to sync. In this case, it's very likely that some inconsistency in the banks data is completely preventing Basiq from being able to gather your accounts and transactions. This will likely be a problem until we open a support request with Basiq so that they can investigate the issue fully.

Potential solutions: try syncing again a few times over a number of days, try adding a traditional Yodlee bank feed.

A feed might fall into an erroneous "authorisation unsuccessful" state, even though it had been syncing without issue up to that point.

Our understanding is that when the bank changes things on their side, the authorisation tokens that Basiq has stored can become invalidated and the connection needs to be reconnected from scratch.

The easiest option to get up and running again will be to recreate your feed, as per "Solution 1: Recreate feed" below. From what we've seen, this process consistently gets accounts to update with transactions again, unless it's an overall missing transactions issue.

Potential solutions: try recreating the feed.

If you've just opened a new account, and you want to have that come in your Basiq feed, then you'll need to recreate your feed. Since your feed is established through you establishing the CDR open banking agreement with your bank directly, the feed needs to be recreated when you want new accounts to be linked up.

Note that it can take up to 24 hours for your new accounts to appear as available for sharing within the bank's authorisation flow, though this can vary between different banks.

Once you're back in PocketSmith and the feed is synced, the account will appear within the Unlinked Accounts section for your feed, ready to link up! Find more steps for this here: Steps to link a feed to an account

Sometimes, the most pragmatic solution will be to add a new traditional bank feed via Yodlee, while your Basiq issue is looked into. This'll allow for problems to be worked on by Basiq, while you continue to get up-to-date transactions and balances from a traditional feed.

Note that this is not available for all banks in Australia - for example Macquarie and HSBC do not have traditional bank feeds available for them (and by Murphy's law, these banks experience frequent problems with their open banking feeds).

Follow the steps below to add a traditional bank feed via Yodlee.

Step 1 - If you want to switch to a traditional feed without continuing to work on fixing the Basiq feed, please first remove the Basiq feed:

Step 2 - Alternatively, if you want to continue to fix that Basiq feed, first unlink the accounts associated with it:

Completing either step 1 or 2 above is important, to ensure that your existing accounts are available to be relinked up to your new feed accounts in the following steps

Perform a feed search to search for your bank - enter your search term into https://my.pocketsmith.com/feeds/new?search= (avoid clicking the large icon in the search page shown, as these are all for Basiq feeds)

Once you have your search results, add the option without the "open banking" tag next to it

Follow the required steps to authorise your traditional feed via Yodlee

At the end of the authorisation process, you'll be guided to relink your accounts again. Follow this guide on our Learn Center if required: Linking feed accounts to existing accounts.