Big banks for months have been clashing with operators of popular websites that help consumers and small businesses manage their finances.
Now, Wells Fargo & Co. is hoping a deal with one of the companies will lead to a broader truce on the issue.
The San Francisco lender, the largest in the U.S. by market value, is set to announce a partnership with software firm Xero, which the firms say will allow the bank and the small-business-accounting specialist to work together with reduced cybersecurity and reliability concerns.
The agreement, which doesn't affect Wells Fargo consumer accounts, could ease tensions between the bank and firms that aggregate personal-financial data. Wells Fargo said it would like to use the new plan as a blueprint for its dealings with other more widely used sites.
"This is a broad cross-industry set of issues that need to be addressed," said Brett Pitts, head of digital for Wells Fargo. He said its new approach, set to be announced as early as Tuesday, is "a very important first step."
As part of the bank's new strategy, Wells Fargo small-business customers will no longer need to share their bank passwords when logging into Xero's website. Instead, customers will be directed to a Wells Fargo secure server where they can select the account information they want shared.
Wells Fargo's servers and Xero's servers will use a unique token to complete the information transfer without the password being shared, the companies said.
The bank is continuing talks with other firms about its new approach, Mr. Pitts said. He declined to specify which firms or discuss how far along the discussions are.
Wells Fargo is also talking with the industry group known as FS-ISAC, which said late last year that it would develop security guidelines for financial aggregators to follow. FS-ISAC had no immediate comment.
"In an era of increasing concern about the security of electronic financial data, it is time to move toward more secure and more reliable data exchange methods," Mr. Pitts said in a statement.
Last fall, big banks including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo temporarily limited the flow of information to some websites and mobile applications that aggregate consumer financial data.
Banks' concerns stem from customers sharing bank passwords with the personal-finance sites. Once the sites have access to the passwords, they frequently seek new information from the banks' sites, often without the customer being involved.
Popular finance sites such as Mint, owned by Intuit Inc., and Quicken Inc. use bank information such as account balances to give their users an up-to-date personal financial snapshot.
Quicken and Xero, meanwhile, perform a similar service for small businesses, tracking payments, tax filings and accounts across one or more financial institutions.
The frequent requests however have created problems for banks. J.P. Morgan Chief Executive James Dimon wrote in his annual shareholder letter in April that customers allowing payment companies, aggregators, financial planners and others access to their bank account information "warrants special attention."
He said J.P. Morgan analyzed many of the contracts these third parties use and found more information is taken than the third party needs to do its job.
"We simply are asking third parties to limit themselves to what they need in order to serve the customer and to let the customer know exactly what information is being used and why and how," Mr. Dimon wrote.
Other financial firms have warned their customers off giving their usernames and passwords to such sites, saying such sharing could lead to cybersecurity threats. Banks also said the frequent requests for account information had slowed down their websites.
A spokeswoman for Intuit said "delivering secure and seamless connectivity is a shared priority across Mint and thousands of our financial institution partners."
Eric Dunn, CEO of Quicken, said in a statement: “We partner with financial institutions to download financial data into Quicken per our users' specific requests and securely store that information in encrypted form."
Xero said in a statement that "our focus is to work directly with the banks and reputable technology providers to build secure and robust connections." The firm has more than 700,000 customers globally, said CEO Rod Drury. The several thousand who bank with Wells Fargo will be moved to the new service in the fourth quarter. Xero has struck other partnerships with banks and financial firms in recent years, ranging from Barclays PLC in February to PayPal Inc. and Los Angeles-based City National Bank.
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