Why are these API banks always in the UK? I've been waiting to do my banking using curl for years and no one has made it available in the US.
The UK on the other hand has actively encouraged new banks and new tech. It’s had things like instant, free, payments between personal accounts for almost two decades. Contactless transactions for at least a decade, mobile banking for decades, and government mandated banking API for almost 5 years.
In short, the UK has a very active banking sector that’s been rapidly (for banks) innovating for many decades. So the environment and ecosystem are well developed for further and faster innovation.
In the U.S., it seems banks gave up on tech innovation decades ago, and decided that innovation in fees and punitive treatment of customers was their preferred approach. As a result there just isn’t an environment for new innovation, the incumbents find it much easier to crush competition, rather than compete. Why the same isn’t true in UK (which until recently had remarkably few distinct banks), is probably down to the nature of law and regulation, which gives customers lots of rights, and actively punishes banks that don’t uphold them.
Thanks for making me feel old I was thinking "it hasn't been anywhere near that long, I remember the rollout like it was yesterday". Turns out that rollout was 15 years ago.
I think most of those things are EU initiatives, which the UK was a member of at the time.
At least we have all of them in Denmark as well.
no, only the mandated banking API (which is impossible to get access to if you're a startup or an individual)
What am I missing?
(the mostly useless open banking stuff is however due to PSD2)
In the article, Griffin is described as:
> Their services allow Fintech businesses to integrate banking features quickly and securely.
So this is about integration with other FinTech businesses, which I think squarely falls under open banking and PSD2.
I'm not sure why you describe PSD2 as "mostly useless". Did you vote for Brexit by any chance?
That's sad.
I'm not here to engage in flamewars, so let's just leave this here.
-> ends previous comment in an ad-hominem
What do you mean it's impossible to get access to?
If you're a start-up wanting to share your customers' financial data, you can make an API.
If you're a start-up wanting to get access to your (potential) customers' financial data from other institutions, you can get access through one of the many providers (Tink, GoCardless etc), or become a provider yourself with enough work.
Having said that, Denmark is another notable country for its innovation financial systems, ahead of the U.S., many of its EU neighbours and in some areas ahead of the UK.
But the UK has always had a vibrant and innovative financial services sector. Something the EU always had a bit of love-hate relationship with, and something Brexit has seriously damaged.
Faster payments in the UK don't attract an additional charge. Is this the case for instant SEPA?
To be fair, most of the regulations were EU ones, but they were driven by the UK as a member, and they supported them nationally.
Contrast Ireland, which has the same EU regs but is much, much further behind the curve because our regulators focus on different things.
The banks in the US that have APIs tend to focus on large fintech partnerships, so even simple APIs will be expensive compared to a regular bank account. Grasshopper Bank in the US (for example) is one of the few that will do APIs on top of regular commercial bank accounts.
(I work at Treasury Prime, which powers many US banks that do APIs.)
I have to admit that I wouldn't mind being paid a large sum to switch to Griffin, but then again, my current provider is one of the more responsible ones which didn't have to be bailed out in the crisis :)
Column – a chartered bank for developers
I can think of 835 million reasons: https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-rbs-britain/corrected-uk-...
Plus, Open Banking and Faster Payments (which were EU initiatives before Brexit) maybe helped.
"open" banking did (and accordingly you have to be a large company to participate at all)
[1] https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2022/Engli...
doesn't mean the EU had anything to do with the UK's domestic faster payments scheme
(SEPA is also euro only)
See e.g. the sluggish move to chip and pin, sluggish death of checks, slow move to real-time payments. Hard to turn a supertanker with many states and thousands of banks.
The way our system works, the legal address of the end-user determines which bank the bank account is within -- this is largely due to regulatory requirements within the various banking systems.
There is one mechanism by which this could potentially be done from my understanding, but it will take us a few years to fully explore and integrate into that kind of model.
Another model we explored (but again, do not implement) is that instead of holding end-user funds in FDIC-insured bank accounts (in the US -- bank accounts in other countries are not FDIC insured) is treating the funds as a security backed against deposits, which is significantly different, but could make non-US users able to open US-based accounts, but they would not at that point be bank accounts.