Account aggregation is a method that involves compiling information from different accounts, which may include
bank accounts,
credit card accounts, investment accounts, and other consumer or business accounts, into a single place. This may include a
database or may be provided through "
screen scraping" where a user provides the requisite account-access information for an automated system to gather and compile the information into a single page. Usually this database resides in a
web-based application or in
client-side software. While such services are primarily designed to aggregate financial information, they sometimes also display other things such as the contents of
e-mail boxes and news headlines.