In a system for a financial institution or other information maintainer, has a list of its account holders that also have accounts with a portal and have agreed to link their portal account and user account with the financial institution or other information maintainer. When a user logs onto the user's portal account, the portal server can request information from the user account over a trusted link to the financial institution or other information maintainer. The portal can request data for a particular user over the trusted link or can request bulk data for all users, using portal authentication data, as opposed to user authentication data. In the preferred embodiment, the actions allowed on a user account by the portal authentication data are more restrictive than the actions allowed by the user authentication data. As an example, a brokerage house might allow the portal to read recent transaction data for the user but not to make trades on the user's account, while the brokerage house would allow the user to perform many more actions if the user logged on directly to the brokerage house's system using the user's authentication data.