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Yahoo! hopes so. For the first time, Yahoo! UK & Ireland is offering users an account aggregation service after a deal with Moneysupermarket.com.

Yahoo! View My Accounts enables users to compare their financial accounts with the best products on the market and apply for services online. Users will be able to access all their accounts on Yahoo! View My Accounts, rather than having to log on to individual sites. This creates some obvious advantages, but raises other questions.

As Robin Amlot, senior editor at personal finance web site Moneyextra, part of Chase de Vere Financial Solutions, says: "To offer a service like this, you need to operate a reliable, secure service and accept liability if things go wrong."

To ensure consumer confidence, Chris Nixon, director of Moneysupermarket.com, says the service is keen to stress it offers consumers a similar standard of security that banks offer and will be fully audited to ensure best security practices are employed throughout. Moneysupermarket.com indemnifies customers for any money that is removed from their accounts as a result of unauthorised access or unauthorised transactions if the service is faulty.

According to Amlot, Nixon and banks like Egg, which launched its own aggregation service in 2002, online account aggregation is much more developed and commonplace in the US. But, the expectation is that the UK market will grow.

Alastair Bruce, finance producer of Yahoo! UK & Ireland, says: "The market is quite young and we are experimenting to a degree, but we will evaluate this, as with all our projects, as a long-term relationship with Moneysupermarket."

Nixon says: "There isn't a huge awareness in the market, but deals like the one with Yahoo! will launch it and make people more aware of the possibilities.

The days are gone where you have everything - current account, mortgage and so on - with one financial provider. You have a number of passwords and log-ins, so it is convenient to have all this in one place."

Egg has signed up 170,000 registered users since launch in 2002. "We are very happy with that," says a spokeswoman for Egg, which is likely to promote the service more actively this year. "We have brought people into it slowly and we're very comfortable with the way the service is operating."

Egg's service is free to customers and it believes it is working. It points out that users are looking at their finances three times more than they used to, which Egg claims is due to the convenience of having all their financial data in one place.

"The main concern for users is bound to be security. But we are confident we address this. We have to be secure as we are an online bank anyway," says the spokeswoman. "Ultimately, all your money is subject to a 100 per cent guarantee and your password is completely secret." Egg says passwords are secret because, like Moneysupermarket.com, its service is 'client-side', which means passwords for different bank accounts are kept on the user's PC.

Security issues aside, there is the issue of providers launching their own services, like Egg and Citibank, who sell their own financial services products, unlike Yahoo!, which is more removed from the sector. Certainly, its independence is important to Nixon and it's an issue for other brands that might be looking to enter this space.

For its part, Yahoo! UK & Ireland spent some time considering the move into the sector, says Bruce, but he believes that the service will be popular with users and fits in with the Yahoo! brand. "Yahoo! Finance is an independent service and that's what users value," he says.

Amlot believes the brand is probably in the right place to offer such a service: "It is not going to be treading on the toes of other product providers."

Bruce also feels the timing is right. "Five years ago, there was no one place that you could go to for this sort of information and the web has changed that. It is going to be interesting in the months ahead, now that the stock market is showing signs of recovery.

"There is an increasing level of consumer awareness and that is a good thing. We are all about bringing empowerment to the consumer," he adds.