How do you consolidate accounts across several banks without handing over credentials?

The usual answer in this market is an aggregator: you hand over your banking credentials, or your bank is asked to open a dedicated feed, and a third party pulls your positions every night. It works. It also means your logins live somewhere you do not control, and that every bank in the structure has to agree to the arrangement.

There is a second way, and it is the one used here: start from what the banks already send you.

What that means in practice

Every bank already produces statements, valuations and transaction lists, on a schedule, in its own format. Those files are the raw material. They are read and mapped onto the family’s own structure: this account belongs to that company, this line is insurance, this one is financing, this asset sits in that jurisdiction.

Spreadsheets and delimited files are read directly. Where a bank sends only a PDF, the reading for that particular layout is built during set-up, once, and then it keeps working for every subsequent statement from that bank. That is part of what the set-up is for.

Nothing is asked of the bank. No dedicated access, no connection to open, no compliance file to reopen. For a family with accounts in three countries, that difference is usually the difference between starting this month and starting next year.

What you give up, and what you get

You give up continuous updating. Figures are as fresh as the statements behind them: daily where the bank sends daily files, monthly where it sends monthly ones. For a family office reading costs, budgets and returns, that is the natural rhythm anyway. Nobody makes a decision about a villa’s maintenance budget on an intraday number.

What you get is that no banking credential of yours is ever shared with anyone, including with us. There is nothing to steal, because nothing is held. If the arrangement ends tomorrow, no access has to be revoked anywhere.

What consolidation actually produces

Once the statements are read, the same records can be read in two directions. Down, one asset at a time: the villa with its insurance, its maintenance, its staff and its financing. Across, one cost at a time: every insurance premium paid by every company, property, vessel and person, in a single table. Both readings come from the same entries, so they cannot disagree.

That is the part no single bank statement can give you, however good it is: the bank sees its own corner, and the family lives in all of them at once.