Tink Is Joining Visa | Hacker News Reader

Tink Is Joining Visa

tink.com

83 pointspqvst59 comments

Tink was my favorite budget app with automatic connections to my Swedish bank. Until they decided to just close up shop and leave all their users hanging.

Now I guess they took all that valuable market data users provided by classifying all their purchases and signed a deal with visa.

Or at least that's one negative assumption I can make as a former happy user of the Tink app.

How have they closed shop if they are still active?

The app Tink gave notice to its users and just closed down. The motivation was basically "we're moving on to other things".

This was probably pre-pandemic.

What irks me is that I loved the app but also that we the users of the app basically classified purchases that the app couldn't classify itself. So we trained their database on how to classify bank statements into categories. And then they just close down and take all that data with them.

I guess it was a "free" app? Everything has a cost.

Yep, it was free. We tried to monetize it in a few ways but never managed to make it profitable. Also, we loved the app, too!

Jag hade betalt för den!

Can't say that I blame anyone. If it wasn't profitable there isn't much to do. Perhaps communication could have been better? Don't know.

They closed the consumer app but the company has pivoted.

Can you use GDPR and ask them to delete all your data?

Yes. Tink operates within the EU and is, as such, required to fulfill GDPR.

Last i checked they were building some sort of layer for the EU banking system.

I had never heard of them before but the website is incredibly fast, I know my internet connection didn't just improve. If anyone can shed some light on how they're doing it. Try navigating around and even change the website language. It is incredibly fast.

Whoa you are right - I thought they might be preloading the entire marketing site on page load but even loading the blogs is very quick.

Its a static site (Gatsby) hosted on Amazon CloudFront. Almost everything is inlined.

I'm seeing many json calls that return the content showed in the page.

It's json yes but not an api. They are serving json blobs from their cdn which are prefetched.

It's a good site, but nothing particularly clever going on.

JSON pre-fetched from a CDN sounds decently clever to me? If it’s making their website fast, that’s what matters.

Yes, I think the point of saying "nothing clever going on" is to indicate that everyone can and should be doing this. It doesn't take some kind of Steve Wozniak to accomplish.

I believe there is a healthy amount of cleverness available between “Nothing clever” and “Wozniak clever”, and I find it hard to agree with you.

Sure, but this doesn't really do any of that. If you just ship an inlined static site it will be this fast. You don't need any real "technologies" to do this. You just need leadership who will push back on the marketers/PMs who want to ship an entire petting zoo of third-party analytics trackers and A/B plugins.

If they’re using a framework to automate “inlining static sites”, and configuring it to be as fast as possible - I’d call that clever.

Adding analytics scripts or A/B testing is actually still possible, and not precluded by this method. If you prefer to do this manually to prove a point to your marketing team, go right ahead. But please don’t put down actual good work, just because you have high standards for what is “clever”.

It’s good, it’s not particularly clever but as another comment says, that doesn’t really matter. Everyone should be doing this. It doesn’t have to be json payloads. We do the same with lazy loaded react components which are served directly from our cdn as needed. Probably not quite as efficient given react overhead but the effect is similar.

If it's working well, does it have to be clever?

Reminds me of https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks

Do you have any explanation why it gets such a horrible Page Speed score on Google?

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=s...

A few resources are slow to load

It's a single-page application, the entire site and content is loaded on the first load.

I agree it's a single-page application, but while you are navigating content appears to be loaded just ahead of time. E.g. pop open some of the menus, then while you're thinking what to click, they appear to load the different pages that you can navigate to from that menu. They don't load the rendered pages, rather their content as "data", which the single-page application knows how to render.

Wow. That’s zippy. Anyone know any engineers there we can ask for an AMA?

I was thinking the same thing.

It looks like a rather default gatsby setup. Not much to AMA here.

The web is super fast if you just compile down to static, inclined content served from a CDN. Which is pretty close to gatsby defaults.

The pop-up menus also have a very fast transition (compared to many websites) which aids in the feeling of snappiness. I don't know why so many sites insist on very slow transitions

In addition to what other have said, the app begins fetching page data the moment you hover over a link, helping ensure the content is already present in memory when you actually decide to click.

Not for me? Changing the language takes at least 5+ seconds, loading any sub pages is roughly as fast(slow) as anywhere else.

HN is generating a lot of traffic I guess?

Changed to German and it was within a second or two for me.

I'm not sure what they are using but you can try the developer console and see that navigating to a new page costs only some "JSON" data. You can achieve the same with React, NextJS, or Gastby.

This is what websites were like in the 90s if you were on something faster than 56k.

I've had the pleasure of working with the Tink API, along with their competitors like TrueLayer and Nordigen. This space is heating up really fast, and bank APIs are getting funded and gobbled up left and right. Tink's console, website, and API is extremely clean, fast, and well thought-out. What was lacking the last time I checked is their customer support and clarity of the business offering. I'm sure this will improve very soon however.

I have been working with the Tink API recently as well and wasn't super impressed. Maybe it was our use case, but I noticed a few gaps in their documentation and am not a big fan of how they handle permanent users.

Then we had to integrate with a hot-shot European startup banking provider and I started to appreciate Tink's API a bit more. God, that one was a clusterfuck of misleading/wrong documentation and horribly inconsistent API design.

I don't like to be negative but Visa don't strike me as flag-bearers for open-banking. Tink seems like a genuine product for making things more competitive instead of less but Visa/Mastercard/Amex are very famous for keeping the system closed down to benefit their own profits.

I hope this isn't another shuttering of a competitor by acquisition.

Tink seems similar to Plaid, except focused on Europe?

The US DoJ got in the way of Visa's attempted acquisition of Plaid last year.

https://sifted.eu/articles/plaid-visa-tink-europe/

Tink isn't as big as plaid though. We have open banking APIs so there are alternatives.

This is a $2B acquisition.

This isn’t for their budgeting app as many of the thread imply.

This is Visa wanting to get into Open Banking in a major way. Like MasterCard ~$1B acquisition of Finicity.

X is buying Y is not the same thing as Y is joining X. It's almost like these founders are embarrassed about what was probably their plan all along.

I immediately checked the announcement for the word "journey".

BINGO!

So what? "Journey" is a perfectly apt word to use when your company gets acquired for billions. It's like mocking "honored" in an acceptance speech.

I think that it's a reference to https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ Acquisitions which often result in the company closing down.

Tink started as a clone of Mint through data-sharing with Swedish banks. This was probably enabled by shared ownership somehow.

So if your bank partners with them, they'll get access to your financial data and you have no say over that, only recourse to close your account (and what happens with the data already transferred)?

Or is it the kind of service that requires you to give them you bank access details (which is against T&C of most of the banks)?

It seems like it's just a data grab disguised as an API, but what do I know, maybe I am wrong...

I assume a third way: They get your data once you have signed an agreement with your bank.

I agree with you on the data grab but this is true for all those services. Regarding the data they have on you, at least for europeans, you have the right to have it deleted (GDPR).

But you will never get a proof that your data was deleted and if it eventually leaks, company gets a slap on the wrist if anything. So far GDPR is a dead law - sure it looks like companies care with all those banners, but practices hardly changed and big companies can largely ignore it as long as they appear they comply on the surface.

That is technically not correct. GDPR only covers personal data with several important caveats. So you can't be walking around and claiming that it's all personal data and it all has to be deleted. The law doesn't work this way. This is a silly example, but nonetheless - you can't ask police to delete your criminal records. Nor can you request your bank to delete all transaction records from your bank account - even if you are leaving the bank.

In Sweden the banks are required to share data with other entities at the request of the bank customer. So I could intall the Tink app or whatever, and connect to my bank through the app. I think the data formats are even somewhat standardized. Basically the banks where dragging their feets in implementing better customer services and the government slapped them with the sharing requirement.

Yes, this applies to all 31 European Economic Area countries. It covers ~6,000 banks in total and requires banks to build APIs that provide free access to banking data (for licensed AISP companies) and payment initiation services (for licensed PISP companies). This is regulated under PSD2 (Payments Services Directive 2).

Tink uses both real bank APIs (aka PSD2 APIs) and non-regulated proprietary APIs (screen-scraping, reverse engineering mobile APIs). The former method does not require sharing bank credentials - authentication happens on bank's side and data is shared only with end-user's consent. The latter method requires users to share bank credentials. At Nordigen, we built a freemium alternative to Tink using only real bank APIs / PSD2 APIs.

In Europe and the UK, all banks must offer API access to customers' account data, with the customer in control of what is shared with whom. The rules governing this are OpenBanking in the UK and PSD2 (Payment Services Directive) in the EU.

Any company wanting to use account data must get explicit consent from the customer, via a consent flow involving authenticating themselves to their bank. The customer can revoke consent any time via their bank's web site.

GDPR plus the OpenBanking (UK) and PSD2 (EU) regulations provide strong guarantees of security.

Nothing like the US's sharing of transaction data is allowed here.

Tink's role here is to be a single API connecting to all European banks using the PSD2/OB protocols.

> but what do I know, maybe I am wrong...

Yes you are. 100% wrong. Europe is miles ahead of the United States here.

Thank you. Do you think it would be possible for these services to operate in a manner that does not require sharing data with them?

For example, if the 3rd party app wants to show you your aggregate spending, they could run the operation on the bank's server and then the result would be end to end encrypted and shown on a customer device, without the 3rd party being able to read any details. Interesting that they went with full data sharing, that's a bit lazy and careless.

The third parties are tightly regulated. For instance, they need to be registered by the FCA as an AISP or a PISP for respectively showing account info and initiating payments.

Personally, I am comfortable with that.

Your suggestion makes it more complicated for each bank, which means you won't get uniform, consistent coverage. Better to leave more space for Open Banking specialist providers to innovate, while regulating them tighly.

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