This is very exciting. In the EU the fintech revolution is also banging the gates, as in 2018 all banks must support a standard protocol, if I recall correctly.
It's called Psd2, strugling to find a good article about it but TLDR; Banks has to have an open api for payments and to check account statuses.
" Banks has to have an open api" are you sure about that ? I thought there was some criteria to be able to use these APIs
I think the difference is that you can use the APIs of any bank as long as you fulfill some standard criteria; each bank can't set their own, or pick and choose who can "partner" with them to use the APIs. At least, that's my understanding.
Yes but account owner or user will be able to give permission for access to his banking data. So you will be able to use your fav accounting app to fetch data directly from account without doing csv export or hacking something around.
In Germany we have DATEV, which is a company doing exacly that.
In France we have "Bankin" and other apps, but the problem is, since banks don't offer APIs at all, all these apps (called "Aggregators" in fintech language) are doing web scraping to pull the user datas.
It's generally a "read only" view, i.e. you can get account info etc. Root is a "write" API. So you can actually create and modify transactions.
In the legislation banks has to provide a way to inititate transactions. So its not only to view data.
Didn't know that ! It may explain why french bank (like société générale) are starting to offer a way to check other french bank account from their mobile app/website
My company Teller, https://teller.io/ has transactional banking APIs with the UK banks in production today. It'll be coming out of beta soon and I'll do a Show HN at the time but feel free to shoot me any questions at sg@teller.io (don't want hijack Root's thread, awesome work folks!)