REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Account aggregation provider Yodlee has launched Instant Account Verification, its new risk management product that provides real-time account verification. It verifies account ownership and available balance for just about any online transaction, including account openings and fund transfers. "By streamlining the account verification process, Yodlee helps financial institutions reduce costly offline processing, while eliminating the current verification waiting period on initial funds transfers, bill payments, or new account openings," said Blake Hayward, General Manager of Risk Management Solutions for Yodlee. Yodlee hopes to eliminate the inherent obstacles of online verification of account ownership and verification of available funds. Right now many financial players use offline verification methods, such as requiring consumers to mail them a voided check or go through a "challenge deposits" process to verify bank account ownership. These can be burdensome to consumers and seem to fly in the face of the nature of online transactions. What's interesting is this enhancement relies on existing aggregation technology, so the new product was more of an awakening to the importance of getting customers instant online access and how the existing aggregation technology can provide that, said Hayward. "Aggregation is the underlying technology. Our only requirement here is a customer has online ID and password (for a deposit institution), so it's only limited to who has online access," said Hayward. Despite a lot of early hype a few years ago, account aggregation hasn't really taken off among credit unions. Yodlee said it currently has 25 credit union clients. The total number of Yodlee end users among all organizations and financials is about five million.