Show HN: Wisefin – Turn messy bank transactions into beautiful data

Great idea. For personal finance the problem I have isn’t with things like Spotify but genuinely weird one off transactions from merchants that I bet wouldn’t be in a db like this and it’s hard to find out what it was. I’m not sure what the solution is except the banks sharing more metadata about the transaction with their users, it must be technically possible to trace it through somehow. I think it is worse when companies are small and group together or share company names t merchant accounts e.g. the local plumber runs a coffee shop too and so you’d see a completely different description.

Where you could solve this is to get so big that even those things will be in your db because you have so many users (ie most people are using this). But my problem is also solve by legislation about transaction descriptions that banks have to follow.

(I’m not in the USA)

Some background: initially, I started off working on a personal finance app and discovered that transaction info was in a terrible state, even with the big guys like Plaid.

Transaction names were a mess: "170220 SPOTI P23ZFA90EA", "SPOTIF" "AMZN 44237", "AMAZON.COM". And there definitely was no chance in hell I'd get something like a logo...

Over time, I developed an internal solution that really just blew everything out of the water. Slowly, by word of mouth, it started gaining some interest from direct and distant colleagues. Finally, I decided to test out the waters by creating an API for the internal toolkit I had already been using myself. This is the result. Cheers!

Really nice idea, great execution. Also great to see an Edinburgh company :)