Here’s Something Better than the RBC Direct Investing App

The RBC Direct Investing app has delivered the luxury of monitoring your investments on the go. If you’re a short-term trader, this may be significantly beneficial, indeed.

But what if your net worth isn’t tied in securities and cash held on RBC? What if you also have assets and cash in different accounts with different brokers and banks?

This is where it gets tricky.

You could, of course, log into each one of your accounts and manually calculate your investment returns, see where your money goes, and how your net worth is growing.

But this is as tiresome and complicated as it is unnecessary…

In this article, we’ll help you solve this problem through our free app called Wealthica. We’ll explain how you can use it to securely access your RBC data, along with any other account that you have.

In addition, since myFinanceTracker, the budgeting tool made by RBC is discontinued, we will also show you how you can replace it through Wealthica.

Finally, we will guide you through the steps of exporting your RBC investment data to a spreadsheet using our app.

Sounds good?

Let’s dive in then!

RBC Direct Investing App Alternative

You must already know what an API (Application Programming Interface) is. In case you don’t, it’s basically a software interface that is used to allow two apps to communicate with each other.

In the Open Banking world (Consumer-Directed Finance), your bank would provide an easy way for third-party apps like Wealthica to retrieve your balances, holdings and transactions. As an Open Banking enabled institution, the bank offers secure authentication with third party apps and an API to facilitate data exchange.

But, as Phil Siarri recently wrote, open banking is probably coming to Canada but you’ll have to be patient.

This is where Wealthica dives in to save the day. 💪

Using Wealthica, you can simply connect with your RBC Direct Investing app and access your balances, holdings and transactions from Wealthica without logging into your RBC account.

Not only can you connect your RBC Direct Investing app, RBC is only one of the 170+ Canadian financial institutions that you can connect with Weathica for free. Chances are that if you use RBC, we probably support at least one other bank or broker you do business with.

Open Banking (Consumer-Directed Finance) is the cornerstone of the value we provide to our clients. Open Banking is an opportunity for banks to innovate and offer customers new ways to manage their financial life. Embracing Open Banking and the introduction of third-party APIs by big banks allow us to help people who want to see all of their financial data in one place do just that.

If you have more brokerage accounts than just RBC, you can imagine how important this is to tracking everything from your trades and dividends received, to your overall portfolio performance.

Connecting your RBC account with Wealthica will help you:

• See all of your investments in one place without having to log into every brokerage account (if you have more than one account, that is)
  
• Track all of the transactions you make through your broker
  
• Track your portfolio’s performance more accurately by adding any cash that’s uninvested to Wealthica
  
• Export all of your transactions, dividend payments, and holdings in a spreadsheet (Google Sheet or Microsoft Excel)

Use Wealthica to Securely Access your RBC Direct Investing Data!

When it comes to your money, you should be 100% sure that any app you use that gets access to any of your financial accounts is as secure as it gets. Fortunately, we have you covered…

First of all, Wealthica uses AES-256 encryption to protect your data. That’s the same technology used by banks.

On top of that, it encrypts all in-transit data using the latest TLS 1.2 technology. This means that the credentials you entrust us with are encrypted and none other than you can access your data through our app. Our database administrators cannot access the encryption keys that are used.

Additionally, we support a two-factor authentication process to enhance security. When you enable this feature, you will receive a security PIN on your smartphone or authentication app to authorize login from a new device. That way, with your Wealthica credentials alone, no one can access the financial information you have stored on Wealthica.

When it comes to security features, there’s more though. You have the option to receive a daily review of new transactions either via email or simply by using the app, making it easy to detect any suspicious activity and monitor your accounts. You will always receive a notification from Wealthica whenever there is a login from a new location.

Finally, you can delete your account with one click from preferences. It’s unrecoverable and all your data will be completely deleted from our systems.

How to Connect your RBC Account with Wealthica

Now, let’s see how you can start accessing your RBC Direct Investing account through Wealthica. Just follow the steps below and you’ll be one step away from having a better picture of your finances:

1. Sign up to Wealthica
   
2. Click on the “+ Add” button
   
3. Select “Banks & Brokerages”
   
4. Choose RBC Direct Investing from the options below or type in “RBC” if it doesn’t show up
   
5. Click on “Next”
   
6. Fill out the fields by using your RBC credentials
   
7. Click on “Next”

And that’s basically it! Really simple, right?

Just make sure that you also add any other institution that you might have to take full advantage of what Wealthica has to offer to you!

myFinanceTracker Is Going to Be Discontinued. Don’t Worry though; We Got you Covered

Here’s another reason to start using Wealthica. As you may already be aware, RBC has a budgeting tool to help you track your expenses, create budgets, and ultimately help you save money.

Unfortunately, myFinanceTracker will be discontinued soon. That may be a bummer if you are obsessed with managing your money correctly (as you should). But don’t worry because there is a solution.

Wealthica supports many power ups, one of which is the ultimate myFinanceTracker alternative: the Budget Wizard.

This add-on comes as a power-up that you can enable through Wealthica. It will allow you to do everything that myFinanceTracker does, such as:

• Get access to an income/expense analysis
  
• Track all of your transactions
  
• Set budgets
  
• View your expenses through pies/charts to determine what categories your money goes to

In other words, don’t worry about finding third-party solutions that are outside Wealthica. You can have your cake and eat it too…

To activate the Budget Wizard, follow the steps below:

1. From your dashboard, first, click on “Power-Ups”
   
2. Select “All Power-Ups”
   
3. Choose “Budget Wizard”
   
4. Click “Install”

And you’re good to start tracking your finances through Wealthica too!

How Wealthica Allows you to Export your RBC Data to A Spreadsheet

Wealthica also allows you to export anything from your RBC transactions to your holdings.

Just note that this requires a paid plan. You can choose the full-featured Premium subscription or buy the individual Google spreadsheet export feature that costs $5.99 per month. If you prefer to export directly to Microsoft Excel, you can get a 30% discount if you subscribe to Wealthica Premium.

Exporting your RBC data to a spreadsheet through Wealthica is simple. Just navigate to the “Power-Ups” page and select the “Google Sheets Export” or “Microsoft Excel Export” add-on.

After you subscribe to either and load it, you will have to link it to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel and you’re good to go.

Conclusion

As you can see, when it comes to keeping track of your investments and overall portfolio performance, Wealthica can allow you to do that and more. The RBC Direct Investing app has its place but if you want to have everything in one place, you need something more.

We’re on a mission to help people like you be in control of their finances by making it as easy as possible to know where every penny goes. We also want to have a realistic view of their portfolio performance if they want to take everything into account and without taking a painkiller for the headache usually associated with the use of spreadsheets.

Take the first step and sign up to Wealthica today! It’ll only take a few minutes, but you will be keeping up with your finances for years!