J.P. Morgan May Unplug Some Customers’ Access to Account Data

In a notice sent to certain customers Monday, the bank said users of desktop applications such as Intuit Inc. 's Quicken and Quickbooks must sign into the bank's website and follow a series of instructions if they want to continue to sync their bank-account data with such services.

If customers don't act by Feb. 15, 2016, the bank said they won't be able to access their bank-account information through the programs until those steps have been completed. The notice went out to a few hundred thousand customers of the bank, a person familiar with the matter said.

The move comes weeks after J.P. Morgan Chase temporarily disrupted the connections between its customers' accounts and web-based aggregators such as Intuit's Mint.com because the bank's website was being taxed by data requests, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.

A J.P. Morgan Chase spokeswoman said the added layer of security disclosed to customers this week was part of a wide-ranging upgrade of the bank's software that, among other things, enabled customers to load their credit and debit cards onto Samsung Electronics Co's mobile payment offering, Samsung Pay.

The Chase notice cited the importance of the "privacy and security" of its customers' financial information. The spokeswoman added that it was unrelated to earlier issues customers had loading their account data onto aggregator sites such as Mint.

J.P. Morgan Chase customers who also use Mint shouldn't be affected.

A spokeswoman for Intuit said it was aware of the bank's moves and that they amounted to standard updates to its business.

The new measures from J.P. Morgan Chase illustrate the balance banks are trying to strike between letting customers use tools to better manage their spending while guarding against the security risks posed by the sharing of account log-in details.

Such third-party services have ballooned in popularity in recent years, but banks fret that the sites' rise may compromise the performance of their own websites and make account data vulnerable.

Bank executives have been privately weighing these issues for years, but the debate recently spilled over into the public. At a series of conferences, the heads of Bank of America Corp, PNC Financial Services Group Inc. and U.S. Bancorp each voiced their concerns about aggregators.

"They slow down service for the rest of our accounts, and we react to that," said PNC Chief Executive William Demchak at a conference organized by the Clearing House, a bank trade group, last week.

James Dimon, J.P. Morgan's chief executive, raised his concerns about data aggregators in a recent meeting with Richard Cordray, the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Gary Stein, a CFPB official, separately said at the Clearing House conference that the bureau's first priority was evaluate how consumers were affected by any service changes but that it didn't have to address any potential impacts through an enforcement action or new rulemaking.

"We do have... a consumer education division and we can put out consumer advisories," Mr. Stein said.