[UPDATE 11/08/12: Sometime in the past few weeks, the problem went away. I assume Capital One and/or Quicken came to whatever decisions they needed in order to allow automatic downloads once again.]

I have a few Capital One credit cards — have had them for years. I use Quicken to track my finances and have it set up to download financial transactions automatically once a day from all my financial accounts, including Capital One.

A week or so ago, I started getting error messages from Quicken stating that it was unable to download my Capital One transactions. I get these occasionally — say, once every week or two — for different accounts, so I didn’t think too much of it.

But then the error messages were there again the next morning. And when I tried a manual download of Capital One transactions, I got the same message. I kept getting error messages each day. The Quicken messages at first suggested that I needed to log into my accounts at Capital One and authorize downloading of transactions. I logged in…and could find no such authorization. Then the error message within Quicken changed to read, “We couldn’t complete the downloads for your account(s) because your financial institution has disallowed access.”

Hmm.

So a day or two ago, I logged onto the CapOne web site and sent the following message:

I use Quicken to track my expenses. For the last week or so, CapOne has refused to let Quicken download my transactions. Why? (this applies to all my C1 cards)

To which I received this response:

Thanks for your message.

We regret any inconvenience you may have experienced.

Please know that Capital One® does not support Direct Connect services which allow customers to directly load their statements into their financial software.

Thanks for being a Capital One customer.

Regards,

Capital One

Huh? My re-response:

Well, you did up until a few days ago. I’ve had Quicken automatically downloading my credit card statements daily for months. Why the (unannounced) change in policy? And why should I stay with CapOne (vs. balance transfer to other banks that continue to allow downloads)?

To which I received this wonderfully informative and helpful response:

Thanks for your message.

We’ll be glad to assist you. Please call our Online Technical Support Department at 1-866-750-0873 and say or choose the corresponding option number from the following choices:

Unlock Account or press 1
Reset Password or press 2
Mobile Banking or press 3
Technical Support or press 4
General Account Questions or press 5

Our representatives are available 24 hours every day for your convenience.

Thanks for being a Capital One® customer, and please let us know if there’s anything we can do for you in the future.

Regards,

Capital One

So, there you have it. With no prior announcement or warning, Capital One has apparently suddenly disallowed downloading transactions directly into financial software.

Note that I did do some searching online and found a discussion of similar problem from a year ago. It suggested that the problem might be with Quicken and gave a solution.  Tried it. Didn’t work. On the other hand, the Capital One website still gives instructions as to how to download transactions into Quicken. On the gripping hand, this discussion over at Intuit tech support indicates that it’s due to a server/DDOS problem at CapOne, and it’s unclear how long it will take to resolve it, if ever.

I’m curious if others have noticed this problem.  ..bruce w..

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