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Comment by ghostpepper | Hacker News Reader

The killer feature I am waiting for is any site or app with automatic transaction importing from my bank without requiring me to input my online banking password and thus being one data breach away from someone having full access to all my accounts (sms-based 2FA notwithstanding)

This is a solved problem in tech (OAuth, I think) so clearly there are perverse financial incentives (ie. my bank doesn't want to make it easy to me to export my data)

Does anyone know what would have to happen to make this possible? My bank is in Canada, if that matters.

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Or a financial institution could create read-only accounts with no permission to transfer any money anywhere. Besides fintech apps, these are useful for guardians of young or elderly to monitor them. Or when I am traveling in an area with untrustworthy wireless or cellular and want to see if a transaction cleared.

Fidelity Brokerage has this kind of account.

The issue is that many banks treat "read access" as a piece of verifying info that can give full account access.

It’s my understanding that banks in the EU must make their APIs public after PSD2. So...regulation is about the only thing they will get the incumbent to share their data

Yes, you need bank collaboration and they don't want to share the data. Right now the only way to get it is web scraping, basically.

You could create a company that stores all your credentials for you, and they perform an OAuth layer, but then you have to trust them :)

Fintech companies have tried to get at this goldmine of user data. You got it right, banks will never willingly give away this treasure trove of highly monetizable and privileged data abd drive their memberbade away from their own digital offerings.

There are ways. I'm working on one right now! It's not easy and go to market will take a looong time so I'm keeping my day job but I believe it's a problem worth solving.

> It's not easy and go to market will take a looong time so I'm keeping my day job but I believe it's a problem worth solving.

Is your solution technical, or do you also have a solution for the fact that it's a service banks have no incentive to offer? (And incentives not to)

Try a European bank, but I get the impression that they firmly wait until local regulation allows what they’ve built for elsewhere.

For personal tiller excel with service account credentials

Spendee? Not sure if they expanded out of Europe finally.

This is a solved problem in the EU thanks to PSD2.

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