My bank has an API so I built online banking

These sorts of hopes seem to be the primary impetus for the "next generation" blockchain tech, such as Counterparty and Etherium.

In South Africa we have the same situation, no access to banking APIs so little room for innovation.

As a side project I decided to try and build banking infrastructure from the ground up, learning Go in the process [1], writing about the development along the way [2].

There is so much room for innovation in the traditional banking space, i.e. not using cryptocurrencies. Hopefully there will be innovation, especially when it comes to managing risk.

[1] https://github.com/ksred/bank [2] http://blog.ksred.me/tags/banking-infrastructure/

I took a look at the data Simple returns at some point a while back and it seemed (upon just an initial glance) that it would be fairly straightforward to extract data from. Everything that you saw on-screen could also be found in just a handful of JSON data points. Obviously there's the issue of constructing some kluge-y authentication mechanism which in and of itself would be insecure. But if you wanted the data, Simple by no means obfuscated it.

Hi redbeard0x0a, fully agree! We do try to open source as much as possible. We have open-sourced large parts of our stack already:

https://github.com/mondough/

>you need a huge amount of capital to start and you are regulated in a way to prevent fast growth. These 2 things pretty much rule out the 'standard' way of doing startups.

Mondo have raised 2 million pounds and "are looking to raise around £15-20 million before its full launch" so not that much more than many startups. Not sure about regulation preventing fast growth. I guess it slows it a bit.

To be perfectly honest, though, the 'standard' way of doing startups is a terrible idea when you're talking about people's savings.

I have accounts at Chase, Citi, Capital One and a small credit union. All of them support exchanging of statements through OFX.

I wrote a small Python script around ofxclient[0] which downloads daily statements from all of these accounts and then merges them into a GNU Ledger-formatted text file. I was inspired to do this when GNU Ledger was on the front page here about a month ago[1]. I keep the ledger itself version controlled using git. It's been working great -- the script not only downloads the statements but also identifies certain keywords in the payee name and attributes those against the matched expense account.

[0] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ofxclient/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510394

You could start with Bitcoin only, then when you are big enough you can start with other currencies too.

> I would love to see an opensource bank, open code all the way down to the core services that a bank depends on

Yeah, no thanks. I would not trust my money with a bank like that. A lot of fraud prevention is based on obscurity, and multiple steps of hurdles to make it easy to reverse a transaction. There's a reason money transfer takes a few days.

Source: I work in a tangential field

The idea of an API was the ONLY reason why I created a Simple account. It is really sad that they aren't going to expose an API.

Well, there goes the last reason to hold on to my Simple account. The API is what I was hoping for.

Hey, I work at at Mondo. We're building a startup retail bank with an API for developers.

You can find our API documentation here: https://getmondo.co.uk/docs

The APIs will be publicly available to developers and account holders. We've only just started rolling out our first cards, though, so we're not on boarding many third party developers at the moment.

If you'd like to play around with the API, send an email to developers@getmondo.co.uk and we'll see what we can do :)

There aren't many major US banks that will do this for you right now unless they're actually not banks and in fact prepaid card users that explicitly do not have a bank charter.

This is because online account opening for banks is a very hard problem, and anyone with a bank charter basically can't use the closed loop trick that other services are using to provide money movement and storage without a charter.

Once you are past account opening, it's more about tech politics. No major US bank has publicly pushed an Oauth gateway, for example. But this is more about risk and the politics of contracts with financial aggregators than anything else. You can find hints of these murky waters in the articles surrounding the recent dust up between Chase and Intuit.

I've heard of https://plaid.com/ but have no personal experience with them.

Silicon Valley Bank is taking beta signups right now for their API banking products https://www.svb.com/api/

From their director of API banking, "With API banking we aim to deliver a set of services that allow our customers to interact with the bank securely, programmatically, at high speed and with little (or no) manual intervention." https://www.svb.com/Blogs/Dan_Kimerling/Our_Mission_for_API_...

I was a user of Egg Money Manager. This site from the (now gone) UK bank presented all of your bank accounts, loans and credit card balances in a single place.

A clever way to avoid them handling any of your bank account details, they used a Java applet that stored your creds locally, interacting with their site so as to appear 'on the web'. Actually a great solution vs. giving your banking creds to a third party.

Encouraging that teller.io seems to be architected similarly. Would love to hear more.

As isomorph says I've built a fully transactional API that works with existing major banks. We currently have a closed beta supporting banks in the RBS group (RBS, Natwest, Ulster, IOM) and we'll be adding Barclays and HSBC next.

http://teller.io/

Hi DomBlack, I work at Mondo.

The cards we're issuing now are prepaid debit cards backed by another firm's license (Wirecard Card Solutions Ltd).

We're aiming to have a full banking license and issue our own cards by the end of next year.

It's true! :)

Warm regards, James @ Self Lender

When we have to ask the answer is generally 'no'.

I'd be pretty interested in something like this also.

It's Postman[1], a Chrome app for making HTTP requests/testing API's that has a ridiculously full featured free version.

1: https://www.getpostman.com/

It's postman, see: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman/fhbjgbifli...

As others have said, that tool is Postman. I'd also suggest looking at Paw.

https://luckymarmot.com/paw

Yep, a friend of mine is building a product that exposes the private APIs that banking apps use in a developer-friendly way: http://teller.io/

That said, using your account data in that way with third parties is often against the terms of service that a customer has with their bank.

This is true for even some small-town banks. I switched to Windows Phone last year and built a personal banking app that would display my financial details on a live tile. While using Fiddler to figure out the necessary API calls, I discovered that my tiny bank's Android and iOS API was actually provided and maintained by a much larger bank.

It turns out that the bigger bank has dozens of smaller banks using the very same API, and its a trivial matter of switching a URL slug to make my makeshift API work for these other banks.

It was an interesting learning experience, but I did manage to get myself locked out of my own bank account a few times while replicating the login process.

> I'm pretty sure that those are for private use

.. And do you do everything you're told? ;)

I think we put far too much weight into magic documents like Privacy Policies and Terms of Service, etc.

Hi, I work at Mondo.

We need to work through a bunch of KYC and AML issues around EU-wide signup, but it's definitely high on our priority list.

That said, our accounts will initially be GBP only, so we'd hold your balance in pound sterling.

If you sign up to our waiting list we'll reach out as soon as we know more :)

There's always the SQLite-esque approach in the form of OFX and related formats.

You can download daily statements using a client like ofxclient[0] and then transform them into a ledger appropriate for GNU ledger. From there you can pretty much extract and export whatever it is you'd like to know.

[0] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ofxclient/

Nope. They just store your 6-8 character password in plaintext behind their huge monolithic Java/.Net/Cobol app.

What would you do instead? (aside from the obvious "not use PHP in the first place")

They're a rocket ship IF they can get regulatory approval.