Cooperative CUSO CU*Answers is planning to deploy OAuth in 2021 to support integration between Intuit (Quicken) and CU*Answers’ business online banking solution, It’s My Biz 247. CU*Answers CEO Randy Karnes said, “Credit unions want to let vendors in, and vendors do not want to fiddle with the details of user sign-ons, security questions, and passwords. To date we have resisted this approach, but now feel the time is right to launch some projects and test these waters.”

CU*Answers currently has three credit unions sponsoring the integration between Intuit (Quicken) and It’s My Biz 247.  Research for a best-practice approach solution is going on now to prepare for a market launch in 2021.

OAuth is a set of open source technologies that allows a user to explicitly grant permission to a given internet service to access their resources on a different internet service. It can do this without the user having to divulge their passwords to any third party. For example, if a member has all of their photos stored in Dropbox, but wants to use an online photo printing service, access to Dropbox needs to be granted. Using OAuth provides that mechanism on a temporary basis with no passwords involved.

OAuth is not a user authentication. It is another approach to grant trust between two digital services. OAuth dates back as far as 2006 and has been widely adopted by sites including Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Microsoft, PayPal, Quicken, Twitter and many others.