Financial connections

A guide to financial connections, and what they actually are.

Written By Matias

Last updated About 3 hours ago

A financial connection represents the consent you have given Synci to access your financial data at a particular institution. Depending on the institution, a connection gives Synci access to one or more bank accounts, brokerage accounts, or crypto-exchange accounts. Each authentication with an institution counts as one financial connection.

Formerly "bank connections": Synci now supports more than just banks, so bank connections have been renamed to financial connections. Everything you knew about bank connections still applies; this article covers the additional connection types too.

Create a financial connection: Adding bank accounts

Anatomy

A financial connection is the "parent" of all its accounts. In order to add accounts to Synci, you first create a financial connection to the institution that holds them.

The structure of our financial entities looks like this:

Financial Connection → Financial Accounts → Transactions → Transfer Logs & Rule Logs

If you delete a financial connection, every account belonging to it is also deleted, along with those accounts' transactions, balances, and logs. This cannot be undone.

Connection types

Synci supports three kinds of financial connections:

  • Banks (EU & UK): Your everyday bank accounts. These connections are governed by open-banking (PSD2) rules, which means the consent you give is time-limited and must be renewed periodically (see Consent below).

  • Banks (New Zealand): NZ bank connections use enduring consent, so they do not expire on a fixed schedule. You can add or remove banks, and revoke access, at any time from the connection's Manage page.

  • Brokerages & crypto exchanges: Investment and crypto connections give Synci access to your holdings, balances, and account activity (trades, dividends, transfers, and so on). These connections do not use a time-limited consent. Note that most brokerages make activity data available with roughly a one-day delay, so these connections sync once per day.

Status

Every financial connection has a lifecycle status:

  • Pending authorization: The connection has been created, but you haven't completed authentication with the institution yet.

  • Connected: The connection is active and syncing.

  • Disabled: You (or Synci, after repeated failures) have turned the connection off. It stops syncing but keeps its data.

  • Revoked: Access was withdrawn, either by you or by the institution.

  • Expired: The consent period has ended (EU/UK banks only). Renew the consent to resume syncing.

  • Error: Something went wrong at the institution's end. The status message on the connection page shows the details we received.

Health

Separately from its status, Synci tracks the health of every active financial connection. Health reflects one thing: our ability to retrieve the connection's accounts from the institution.

Every 24 hours, Synci refreshes each connection to keep its accounts up to date and to pick up any newly available accounts. Health works like this:

  • Healthy: The last refresh succeeded. Everything is syncing normally.

  • Failing: A refresh failed. Synci keeps retrying, but while a connection is failing, sync attempts are limited to once every 24 hours. After 3 consecutive failures we'll email you a heads-up. As soon as a refresh succeeds again, the connection is automatically restored to healthy. No action is needed on your part.

  • Dead: 10 consecutive refreshes have failed. The connection stops syncing, and you'll receive an email letting you know. To get it working again, renew its consent (or reauthorize it), or create a new connection.

When a connection fails, the error message we received from the data provider is shown on the connection page. It often explains exactly what went wrong (for example, expired consent or a temporary outage at the bank).

Consent

For EU and UK banks, a financial connection represents a consent that is valid for a set period of time. When creating the connection, you can choose how many days the consent should remain valid: anything between 1 and 180 days (though some banks cap this at 90 days). After the consent expires, the connection is disabled and stops syncing data.

You can also revoke consent manually at any time by disabling or deleting the connection.

Synci emails you before a consent expires: one week before, again the day before, and once more when it has expired. An expiry should never take you by surprise.

New Zealand banks and brokerage/crypto connections don't have a consent expiry, so this section doesn't apply to them.

Renewing consent

You might want to renew a connection's consent if:

  1. The consent is about to expire or has expired (you'll receive email alerts about this).

  2. Its accounts are not working properly.

  3. You have opened new accounts at the institution that require a new consent.

  4. You want to change the permissions or settings you originally agreed to.

When renewing, you're given the option to change the connection's settings (detailed below).

Reauthorizing and managing

  • Reauthorize: Available on all connection types. Takes you back through the institution's authentication flow to restore a broken or expired connection without losing any data.

  • Manage: Available on New Zealand bank connections. Opens the provider's portal where you can add banks, remove banks, or revoke access entirely.

Settings

You can customize the following settings when creating a new connection to an EU/UK bank:

  • Sync Balances: Control whether Synci retrieves account balances from this connection. This applies to all accounts belonging to the connection.

  • Max History: Decide how far back in time Synci can fetch transaction data. The maximum available period is determined by your bank.

  • Access Valid For: Set how many days Synci has access to your data before you must reconfirm your consent. The maximum is usually 180 days, but some banks only allow shorter periods (for example, 90 days). If your bank has a lower limit, you cannot set a longer duration.

Connection settings cannot be changed after creation, because they are part of the agreement you consent to when authenticating with your bank. If you need to change any of these settings later, renew the connection's consent and adjust them during the renewal.

Limits

The number of financial connections you can have depends on your subscription plan. There is no limit to the number of accounts within a connection.