Ask HN: General API for accessing bank transactions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: General API for accessing bank transactions?

4 pointsaykhm3 comments

I currently track expenses monthly by downloading credit card/checking account statements as CSVs and importing into excel. It's a bit annoying as I have to 1. wait for statements to post so I can't track the current month and 2. statements don't line up exactly with calendar months.

I'm looking for a general way to access transactions across all my banks, but the ones I've found all have some issues.

- Plaid: seems oriented more for businesses and isn't very friendly for personal use. They do have a personal use version but it doesn't support certain banks (e.g. Chase)

- Teller.io: unfortunately doesn't support one of my accounts (Bilt)

- Fintable.io: syncs transactions to airtable/google sheets which maybe could work, but doesn't have a simple API.

Am I missing any alternatives? Plaid supports all the institutions I want but getting setup as a non-business seems to require too many steps. Maybe any consumer-facing wrappers around Plaid's API?

Plaid does support personal use (including personal use access for Chase). I'd actually be interested in seeing where you saw that it doesn't support Chase for personal access so I can make sure our messaging is clear and consistent on that front!

It's true that the current onboarding flow is not designed for personal use cases; we're currently in the middle of revamping it to make it less onerous for non-business users. In the meantime, I recommend you just fill out the questionnaire as well as you can. We know that some of the questions don't really make sense in a personal use context -- just try to answer them to the best of your ability and you should be fine.

I saw that there is a limited production mode, but it doesn't support institutions such as BofA or chase (https://plaid.com/docs/sandbox/#testing-with-live-data-using...). I submitted the questionnaire for production access and got access, but it says it will be revoked unless I complete a list of security attestation requirements.

Seems like the barrier to entry seems a bit high for personal use. Even with production access, I can't just link my bank accounts and use the API right as I would have to setup authentication and Link myself right? Looking forward to see more about the revamp, though.

Thanks for the details! Glad to hear you've got full Production access -- if any of the security attestation requirements seem unreasonable for your use case, feel free to reach out to us directly (you can email me at ahoffer@plaid.com and let me know you're the person in this thread) so we can look into it.

You do need to set up Link, but it's pretty easy. The Tiny Quickstart(https://github.com/plaid/tiny-quickstart) has a bunch of minimal examples. If that's too much we have a super-minimal, no-code set of instructions for making API calls in the Postman Quickstart (https://github.com/plaid/plaid-postman?tab=readme-ov-file#ma...).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com