Comment by dbbk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbbk | Hacker News Reader

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Just current accounts. And yes, the UK does need a new kind of bank. Monzo's USP is that their technology is modern and built from the ground up. For the end user, this means you get push notifications of card transactions instantaneously. You can freeze and unfreeze your card instantaneously. The Monzo app uses your phone's location to determine when you travel to a new country, and doesn't block your card for suspicious activity as a result. It gives you realtime currency conversion for your transactions. The app allows you to budget your money, and categorise where you spend it. And more.

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Oh and I forgot to add, they offer a complete API, so you or third party developers can build on top of your financial data. No other bank offers this today.

> Oh and I forgot to add, they offer a complete API, so you or third party developers can build on top of your financial data. No other bank offers this today.

this part ain't completely right - all current banking backends on the market offer instant messaging integration, otherwise they wouldn't be bought. it's not straightforward API calls directly in the backend (which some would prefer to not expose directly anyway). a bit of glue code is required but this is how in the moment these systems evolve to conform to ever changing regulations for example. otherwise banks would have to shut down

Publicly accessible API then.

this is not an advantage then, you don't need to be a seasoned architect to see all kinds of potential issues with publicly exposing these APIs, even with proper security. I mean this is the core of every bank, not some application X storing some small subsets of crucial data.

Best and easiest security to achieve and maintain is no public access at all (something like physically separated networks vs authenticated ones)

All banks in the EU will have to offer APIs in 2017 because of PSD2: http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2015/january/key-features...

The alternative to open APIs is that third parties ask customers for online banking passwords. This practice is significantly less secure than, say, OAuth2 or similar and is generally against a bank's TOS, which makes the customer liable.

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