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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

This mostly seems to be required because banks don't provide usable data properly. There should be a way to tie together authorisations and finalized transactions. Any API/interface that doesn't permit this is just broken.

Monzo's API includes a unique transaction ID as well as a timestamp to indicate when (if it has happened) the transaction 'settled'. The open banking APIs implemented by the CMA9 include a BookingDateTime and Status (Booked or Pending) and an immutable transaction ID. It's surely just common sense to do this.

Why is there no regulation to require banks expose a usable API in NA?

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We don't have the whole story of their infrastructure and that a lot of Plaid's data sources are scraped and/or aggregated and repackaged in nonstandard ways. ACH and transaction tracking have been working fine for the last 20 years prior to a clever ML system.

Nacha ACH spec per BoA for example:

https://files.nc.gov/ncosc/documents/eCommerce/bank_of_ameri...

It's not exposed though, right? ACH is just for banks settling between themselves, is it not?

The entire point of OB and PSD2 is that any regulated company can get access to this data.

why would a bank be required to expose this for a 3rd party commercial user?

In my mind the question is why wouldn't they be? It's your transaction data, you have many legitimate uses for it, why not require open access? It's like GDPR but for your bank records. The data's available now, it's just crap. Sometimes banks need a kick in the pants to straighten up.

It should be required to pass it on to you and for you to seamlessly pass it on to any third party of your choosing.

As mentioned on another thread, the UK enforces such an API for the largest banks (it's voluntary for the others at the moment) https://www.openbanking.org.uk/

This is part of a wider "challenger bank" initiative. Creating space for smaller, usually digital only, banks to create more competition in the consumer banking market. This was thought to be especially important after the "too big to fail" crash. Directly breaking up the larger banks was never going to happen, so instead they created an environment where competition could (hopefully) flourish.

the US doesn't need more banks. The market is actually culling them dramatically- https://www.fdic.gov/bank/statistical/stats/2019Mar/FDIC.pdf (number of banks since 1990!)

From what I can tell there are 10x (about) as many "banks" in the US.

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