Nordigen: Free banking data and premium insights | Hacker News Reader

Nordigen: Free banking data and premium insights

nordigen.com

53 pointsrmesters39 comments

Minor complaint - went to mouse up to click on pricing and I suppose my cursor went out of the viewing window, and I got an annoying "wait don't leave" pop-up. I'm sure this is intentional and perhaps it's better for your business to have it, but I personally find it a good reason to close the tab.

Perhaps add a tiny waiting period when the mouse leaves in case it is accidental and not aimed at hitting the "x"?

Looks cool and all, would like to be able to use. Bit bothered that it's a Show HN since you can't actually try it out, this is just asking you to sign up to a mailing list or contact sales basically. This is funny because you have two buttons as the call to action, "Get Free Access" and "Contact Sales". Both of them leads you to having to wait for them to contact you back.

Having a list of supported banks upfront would be nice as well.

Thanks - super valuable feedback. A fully self-service onboarding is on the way. I get the frustration of having to wait, we're working on that.

Consider when you try to build momentum. I for one won't be checking back until you make the news again.

I think you haven't understood - it's a requirement of ShowHN that the service is readily useable for free try-outs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Regardless, best wishes with the project, sincerely.

I've taken Show HN out of the title now. Thanks.

Your privacy policy seem quite vague. Do you sell transactional data? Anonymised or not? I've been looking for an alternative to Yodlee, but they all seem to be selling the scraped data in the background.

We’re regulated by GDPR (Europe's data privacy law), which is super strict about data.

Sure, but nothing in GDPR forbids you to sell data, as long as you're up front about it and ask for permission. Not answering "Do you sell transactional data? Anonymised or not?" with a clear yes or no is a bit worrying.

Since you're Europe based, this was implied. As mentioned by a sibling comment, this doesn't mean you don't sell data. Your vague reply seems to imply that you do end up selling this data. I guess this kind of makes sense, considering selling the data probably makes you a lot more money than the €0.50 per month.

We don’t sell the data. Our business model is to help developers/businesses access banking data (with end-user consent) and make sense of the banking data to power their apps.

One of the maintainers of KMyMoney, an open-source personal finance software. We looked into (https://invent.kde.org/office/kmymoney/-/issues/21) leveraging one of the 3rd party aggregators like yours to allow users access their data. The conclusion was that being an open-source software was a no-no for all of them, unless we were willing to sign our binaries with certificates (that the aggregators require) and distribute the software as such. All of that obviously aside from the cost of the service itself.

Do you see if this could be made possible with Nordigen?

Firefly III [0] solves this by making the user responsible for this. They expect you give it the necessary details (api keys etc) for Spectre, which it then uses to download transactions. Could you not do something similar? Write a small guide for users on where to register and what to do, and give them config options to put in the necessary API Keys, and then use that to download the transactional data?

[0] https://docs.firefly-iii.org/firefly-iii/importing-data/intr...

We discussed this, but I decided it was not worth the effort for something that relies on temporary Dev accounts that are limited in functionality (no PSD2 endpoints work) and that require you lying about the purpose of such account. I don't find that ethical at all. And, again, no PSD2 endpoints.

I would love to use this for my personal bank accounts so that I can setup custom scripts / alerts, but I'm uncomfortable not paying for this. At that point I feel like the product, and even after reading your entire privacy policy, I'm still on the fence.

Especially with this part -

"Nordigen may also provide personal data to companies that process personal data on behalf of Nordigen such as marketing service providers. Nordigen will be responsible for the correct processing of Your personal data."

Switch to a bank that provides you API access directly? In the UK all the modern "challenger banks" provide it.

Really great to see alternatives to plaid! A few years ago I looked to setup an online finance tracker for personal finance and eventually dropped the idea of connecting with Banks using Plaid or Salt due to the excessive costs - especially for just a side project idea.

Hopefully banks the world over will start to standardise their API's and we'll have access to more and more third party apps which can help people with their finances!

Oh just an FYI - I'm getting a 403 error when trying to subscribe to your mailing list, it looks like a CSRF error: "CSRF verification failed. Request aborted."

UK and Europe has already done this. Australia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Japan are all working towards this. It's happening.

> Hopefully banks the world over will start to standardise their API's and we'll have access to more and more third party apps which can help people with their finances!

I got good news for you, Europe has already been working on a solution for this for a long time, finally coming to fruition now. Nordigen seems to be using PSD2 as well.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive

Except in reality there is no standardisation, and everyone's API is different. Making it that much harder to actually integrate. Still, having _an_ API is way better than no API.

FYI - Plaid is free for 100 linked accounts (and has been since inception) so it should work for personal use cases.

Disclaimer: used to work there

How does this compare to others, such as Truelayer?

CEO/co-founder of Nordigen here. We plug in to the same Open APIs as Truelayer, but we don't charge for access to banking data. We only charge for value-adding data services (e.g. Transaction Categorisation, Credit Insights) that help developers get more value from banking data.

Truelayer cost structure is quite low, order of £400 per month if I recall correctly, which I often thought was relatively cheap. I wonder if the value proposition of free vs £400 is compelling enough. How does Truelayer cost scale up?

A minor thought on how you could improve on the service Truelayer offers: It requires some dev work to setup the auth callback, requires hosting a server etc. This is perhaps because the product is more enterprise than hacker, but this is more work than say Codat that is providing the same service for accounting systems, without the need to host our own auth service.

FYI https://teller.io has been operating in Europe for over six years now giving third parties access to the private banking APIs (not the cut down PSD2 equivalents), long before they opened in the US.

If they have been operating for six years, they really went all the way out on minimalism. Their website barely have any information about how it works and what are the requirements. List of supported countries and banks is also absent. Is https://teller.io/ maybe not the main page?

First time coming across them after following Plaid/Truelayer/Nordigen for a while. Thanks!

Why are you pitching for teller? Over 6 years means founded in 2015, right?

The legal notices page on teller.io (I read all the way through) does not mention anything about Europe or even GDPR.

Pitchbook indicates Teller.io was founded in 2018, with a $4m seed round in January 2020: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/267839-56#overview

The UK company with the same address as that given by Pitchbook says Teller Inc (UK) Limited was registered in January 2019.

Because using the banks own API is provably less brittle better than scraping (as proven in Teller vs Plaid integration uptimes) and OpenBanking APIs are absolutely limited compared to the bank's native APIs - you can confirm both of these for yourself.

Thanks for the conspiracy theory, but I don't own any Teller stock - I've known of Teller since 2015, mainly through Elixir (Teller is one of the first big Elixir-based startups) and the London startup community.

I guess this is really a question to @rmesters, who indicated in a reply that he is CEO of Nordigen.

Can you explain what has changed versus the standard product Nordigen had in the market around 2 years ago? I remember having sales calls with Nordigen in October 2019.

Today Nordigen offers Free access to banking data and Premium data insights as a service. For reference: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/01/nordigen-introduces-free-e... In 2019, we only offered Premium banking data insights as a service (no account aggregation functionality).

How can I see a list of banks I can actually connect to in each country?

Ps. This looks great, and I will try it out, if my bank in Denmark supports it/is supported. :)

There's a good chance we support your bank in Denmark. We support a good bunch of banks in DK already.

That doesn't actually answer the question: where is the list of supported banks published?

I think the color palette of your website it not looks great.I would have use softer color (eg. Stripe, ModernTreasury etc.)

FYI: LinkedIn or Github account needed

In Europe, this isn’t needed because of PSD2.

Fair point. But Europe is also a bit of a mess - 6,000 banks with unique banking APIs. And the large open banking incumbents are charging for access to banking data that's available via PSD2 for free. We're trying to make it a little less messy, by providing free access to data that's actually free (it's weird how it's a thing, I know).

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