Bank of America Cut Off Finance Sites from Its Data
nasdaq.com
nasdaq.com
It's antiquated.
http://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-persp...
To add, the US is so complicated because we have so many friggin banks. Many countries there are only a few banks the service the nation, while the US has something like 14,000 different banks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service
[1] https://fedpaymentsimprovement.org/get-involved/faster-payme...
Mint complied with the banks' demand to not display running balances but they do display data going back indefinitely in time.
What Mint has shown the banks is how valuable the data is to advertisers. The data is so valuable that Intuit is shutting down their popular $50/year semi-subscription Quicken software in favor of advertising to people via Mint.
In an ideal world a government regulator would step in and ensure data access and privacy. But we do not live in a very ideal world.
No, in an ideal world there would be much more competition between banks, forcing them to offer better services in order to keep their customers.
I recently switched to a university credit union. It's generally less internet-friendly (no mobile app, let alone photo check deposit). But unlike M&I, Harris (when it bought M&I), or Citi, my credit union shows every transaction through account creation, with running balances, on a single lightweight HTML page.
Any source on Mint and the banks colluding to not show running balances? I don't doubt you, but I'd love to be able to tell people about it.
I'll never go back to a big bank for checking, but I'm still lining their pockets for credit card interchange fees. CapitalOne's 1.5% back is pretty hard to beat.
What do you have to hide? Everything.
The existing banks burying their heads in the sand when there is obvious consumer demand makes the area much more ripe for a new entrant. I'm not sure how it will play out, but I would consider switching banks in order to have a better UI on my money. Supporting something like Mint or Personal Capital is basically a requirement for me to put my money in your bank.
Note that I'm not even particularly happy with Mint, I just can't imagine not having some form of aggregation of my financial life. I probably check it at least 1-2x a week and have been for 5+ years, it's a critical piece of software for me.
I wish there was a standard and secure format and protocol for collecting balances and transactions built into the FDIC or NCUA rules or something.
It might sound horrifying but JSON or CSV over HTTPS is the most likely to work and the least work for financial institutions to implement (thus giving them less ammo to fight it on cost grounds).
Services interconnecting is largely a solved problem in general. Banks might have needed better security historically, but these days these services are all fairly secure, so there isn't much bar raising that needed. Heck Apple Pay is basically this system.
[1] http://www.programmableweb.com/news/banksimple-banking-servi...
The banks' ship has sailed on the presentation front. They need to concentrate on strong read APIs and novel ways for authentication.
Get ready for war(in the nice, data science-y way)
Incidentally, I have never used one, because that requirement is completely insane.
(Of course there's a huge gray area of things they could do that you wouldn't like, but that would't ruin them. But there's a clear difference between questionable things, like selling your data to advertisers, and completely not-ok things, like stealing your money).
Because there is such thing as a read-only API. But logging into the banking site as a customer permits the aggregator to take actions as the customer, like wire transfers--which are not reversible, and not typically covered by fraud protection.
Sure, I might trust Mint not to do that, but what if Mint gets hacked? By definition, Mint can access my bank creds in plain text, since it must paste them into my bank's website. That is worse security than even my own bank's website, which undoubtedly stores only the hash of my password.
My bank is not going to indemnify me for fraud caused by Mint's security problems. Bank agreements usually say "don't share your account creds," so if you do, and then lose your money, the bank is not likely to make you whole.
No, it's completely different. The entire point of keys is avoid having to store credentials, it has nothing to do with permissioning. In the case of Mint etc., they have to store credentials because there is no token/key system being provided from the banks (ie: oAuth). In the case of something like oAuth creds are never sent to the 3rd party.
And the ironic part of this is if they banks simply provided something like oAuth then they would have MUCH more control over who they worked with and have an easier time managing 3rd party data.
They've open sourced much of their code. Take a look at https://github.com/wesabe/ssu and the other projects in that organization.
I find this mindset incredibly disturbing
Mint is so primitive in comparison.
Does anyone have an alternative banking solution? We aren't eligible for USAA. I'd love to keep local free ATM withdrawals, and I have no idea how depositing cash works for online only financial services.
This either used to be true and its switched back, or they were discussing it and decided not to implement it. Sorry for the mistake.
Also, yeah, as my sibling reply says, you can't deposit cash easily. I think you can technically mail it, but I would never do that. I used to get paid rent by a roommate in cash, it was a few hundred a month. I'd just pay for my meals and groceries with it instead of depositing it.
> Sorry, we can't open this account for you.
> USAA Bank products are only available to military members, veterans who have honorably served and their eligible family members.
People keep saying USAA opened up the door to everyone, but their website says nothing like that.
USAA is a big credit union with national visibility but restrictive membership, but they aren't the only credit union, and credit unions generally are customer-friendlier (since their customers are also their owners); you may want to research local credit unions, most of which now have more open membership than USAA.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/big-banks-lock-horns-with-person...
2. Some are trying to provide their own convenience systems as a competitive advantage over other banks, and to create costs for people switching out from them to a different bank. Supporting any method of aggregation where the bank becomes a dumb store of a money is disadvantageous to that strategy.
Last I heard (um, a couple of years ago), USAA's solution was a proper API, but Mint was still screen-scraping. I have no idea if that's because Mint is lazy or USAA'S API is too limited for what they want, but my money would be on the former.