Should You Parlay Your Passwords Into a Personal Financial Portal?

If a complete stranger approached you on the street and offered to take care of all of your household chores -- free of charge -- if you would just hand over your house keys, would you?

Curiously, that's the premise behind a number of businesses competing in the relatively new Internet arena of "screen scraping." The idea is to consolidate all your financial accounts -- bank, investment, credit card, travel awards, etc. -- in one convenient place. Think of it as your own personal portal from which you can see all your finances at a glance, balance and rebalance accounts, make investments, pay bills -- even collect voice mail and email.

Yodlee, one of the leaders among these account aggregators, currently offers such a service through a variety of partners, including Alta Vista, Intuit (INTU Quote), America Online (AOL Quote) and soon Chase Manhattan Bank (CMB Quote). Other contenders include Corillian (CORI Quote), EZ Login, VerticalOne and ebalance. ...