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Comment by greendream17 | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly what I miss about PSD2, a small company still can't just use an api to do it's banking, checking what money comes in and optionally (semi) automate payments. You still need to lobby your country's ministry of finance to get a license. Great for all the hot customer payments startups but useless for a company that just want to do IBAN and cut out the middle man.

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This is exactly why I hate the name "Open" Banking.

Truly we need two tiers of API access, one which will only work with bank accounts we link to our API developer profile, which is easier to get access to, and another that is meant to handle third party bank data which requires ministry compliance and may need to wait longer for.

What's to stop people from building an integration that requires the API keys from the self-serve access flow? e.g. in the US people are OK with giving their password to Plaid?

> in the US people are OK with giving their password to Plaid?

They absolutely shouldn't be.

There are/were services like that here too, but what trust (or usefulness to be honest) they had will/has erode/d as a consequence.

Also you don't have to be a literal bank, the better (/with enough of an EU/UK focus) services like that will just offer the proper authentication method instead, now (since 2016 I think?) that it's available.

You can get that via banks directly, in whatever proprietary format, if they wish to provide it.

e.g. Monzo in the UK (&US?) offers a personal-use-only 'beta' API (it predated 'open' banking requirement, and they continue to say it's a developer API in beta, don't share access keys yet but one day, but basically it seems to be vapourware at this point). PSD2's 'open' banking is.. I don't know, it's something, but it's not what anybody here wants, or imagines it is from the name if they've not previously heard of it.

It might as well be a standardised Industry COBOL Interchange Specification, a copy is yours for just £25k today! Or join the 2022 edition working group for a mere £250k, and help define next year's mandatory update.

Since you mention COBOL, a lot of work is being done in COBOL to export JSON feeds exactly for this. Since the late 2000s and 2010s back-end core banking space (in larger banks) was largely about moving from disparate code to a common trunk, this, at least for friends 'lucky' enough to be connected to this, seems to be implemented as a general solution so should XTZ country decide to do their own regulatory implementation of Open Banking/PSD2 a lot of the ground work will have been done.

Cofounder of Nordigen here. We built a completely free API to allow small companies check what money comes in, no additional license needed (it's done on the back of our AISP licence). We're connected to more than 1,000 banks in Europe. Here's the link: https://nordigen.com/en/products/account-information/

Indeed, why should it require an intermediary at all? Even individuals should be able to access their banks' APIs directly from their own devices.

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