I’ve banked with BofA for well over a decade and earlier this year (2008) started using their My Portfolio feature that allows for categorizing transactions and linking accounts from other financial institutions providing an aggregated Net Worth view. That was at least until they lost all of my data. Earlier this month I was prompted to change my online user ID and I walked through the multi-step process that had me change my user ID, password and site key. After all that, I logged in an clicked on the My Portfolio view which has been particularly useful to get a quick overview in today’s sinking market but much to my surprise, ALL of my data was gone. The feature had been completely reset losing 7-8 months worth of accumulated data, hundreds of categorized transactions and all of my linked accounts.
Now, I understand to BofA this feature is provided as a courtesy but I’ve spent a significant enough number of hours categorizing transactions and I’m annoyed at having lost all of the data. Of course, at this point I’m in the classic situation of dealing with mega-company support. There is a support case created but that was now four days ago and I have little hope of actually having the data restored.
So, long story short if you’re using Bank of America’s My Portfolio feature understand there is no backup option and there is real potential for you to lose ALL of your data. Unless they can restore my data it’s unlikely I’ll start using My Portfolio again any time soon.
Anyone else have this experience?
[UPDATE: Dec 22, 2008] Called Customer Service again and the tech this time was aware of the problem and mentioned BofA uses a third party company to help provide the My Portfolio service and apparently the bank has a case filed with that company. I was told that other customers had experienced the same problem.
[Update Jan 9, 2009] A member of BofA's online banking technical support called me back to let me know they've lost my data. They also confirmed that I'm not the only user affected by the problem but that they have no way to correct what's happened. It sounds to me like the real issue is that this problem has impacted a limited number of users and they simply don't want to invest the time to figure out what happened. She alluded to the fact that my data may still be there but there is no way to go back and undo what's happened which may be a worse problem as it would mean that my data is now sitting in some no man's zone including account information for my linked accounts. Finally, she mentioned that if at some point things changed she would get back to me.