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Comment by mirekrusin | Hacker News Reader

Somebody told me that 2018 is the deadline for EU banks to provide API access. If that's the case then going through any server side layer managed by somebody is unnecessary and people in general should think twice about every single bank transaction being stored somewhere "there". It gives out a lot of information from your internet provider to your child's creche, holidays habits, income (duh), loan repayments and whether you like on mondays this new sandwich at pret a manger with a coffee for take-away or eat-in - can be inferred as well.

So be careful and if you want to have more insight into your finance maybe it's better to digest those apis yourself, libraries should pop out soon if they are not yet available for your bank (in europe anyway).

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Are they required to adhere to a standardized API?

If not, then I think there's still some utility in a service that can normalize that stuff and provide you with a single, consistent interface.

My understanding is that the EU PSD2 regulation indeed is supposed to make banks adhere to a standardised API. That being said, I wouldn't expect a super easy to use REST api with documentation powered by readme.io.

one would think the people securing our finances has the technical capability to provide modern apis... one would think

If you read the legislation (?) you will see that they are actually very vague in how the banks will provide access. I think it is already a great success that they (fingers crossed) will manage to force the banks to provide access to the data in any form and gave them little wiggle room for justifications to get out of it.

There are however some inititives for open API standards that might be accepted by a majority of the banks.

No, they're just told to implement the technical means so that the user can decide what to do with their personal data. This probably means some kind of API but any bank is allowed to implement them in any way they like.

That's obviously and opportunity for Teller, Figo.io and other players, they can perform legit aggregation just swapping out their scraping for bona fide API access.

But the situation is more complex... even banks can become aggregators for other banks if their customers want... These are interesting times.

Nope. They just need to provide "an API". Got a hundred banks? That's potentially 100 integrations you'll need to do - the barriers remain in place an everyone is happy.

True, but there are only four 'big banks' Barclays, HSBC;, Lloyds Banking Group, and The Royal Bank of Scotland Group.

100% coverage might be quite time consuming, but getting most the market is not going to be excessively hard.

Perhaps four in UK, but PSD2 covers the rest of EU/EEC as well :) That's a lot of integrations...

On the positive side, someone could provide a library which covers these but doesn't require going through a third party. i.e. that library could provide a "single api" with none of the risks of picking an unknown third party. If that were done as an OSS offering you'd also be able to easily confirm there was nothing lurking in the library under the covers.

FYI Open Banking API was announced to have personal customer transaction data on a read-only basis at the beginning of 2018, and the full scope, including business, customer and transactional data, reached by 2019.

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