Design a Financial Data Aggregation Service
Last updated: October 30, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a service that aggregates financial data from multiple sources (banks, credit cards, payroll providers, investment accounts) to provide a unified financial view for users across Intuit products.
Intuit
October 30, 202512
4
4,430 solved
Design a service that aggregates financial data from multiple sources (banks, credit cards, payroll providers, investment accounts) to provide a unified financial view for users across Intuit products.
Touches multiple Intuit products (Mint successor, QuickBooks, TurboTax). Tests understanding of third-party integrations, data normalization, and real-time financial data handling.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design integrations with thousands of financial institutions via APIs and screen scraping fallbacks
- Normalize transaction data across different bank formats into a unified schema
- Handle connection failures, credential rotation, and institution-specific quirks gracefully
- Implement real-time and batch synchronization strategies
- Address security requirements for storing financial credentials and data
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How do you handle a bank that changes their API format without notice?
- What is your reconnection strategy when a user's bank credentials expire?
- How would you detect and handle duplicate transactions across linked accounts?
- How do you categorize transactions accurately across different merchant naming conventions?
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Practice System Design ProblemsSample Answer
Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Integrate with thousands of financial institutions using APIs and fallback screen scraping.
- Normalize transaction data from various banks into a unified sc...
Capacity Estimation
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User Base:
Assume 10 million users across Intuit products. Each user connects to an average of 5 financial accounts. -
Transaction Volume:
If each account generates 10 transaction...
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