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Comment by hmokiguess | Hacker News Reader

I rather have protocols be built and less middlemen PaaS.

One great example is Open Banking. I would support an Open Router that mirrors Open Banking, unfortunately the Open here doesn’t carry the same connotation.

Kudos to the team for succeeding in executing around a clear DX issue during the chaos of providers, though long term I am not really a fan of it staying as is even if Stripe gets to be the one carrying it forward.

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What open banking? I can't even get a read-only token for my personal use to see the balance on my account and I sit two team calls away from people who cooked the API

Where it is already operational and available elsewhere worldwide. Unfortunately complex lobbying and Wall Street not being a fan of it as they’re the biggest loser makes it slow to get it done in the US.

In the EU you also cannot just get a token to open banking.

Deleted. I don’t like starting rage baits… ;)

With vibe coding, you can make a bot that pretends to be human accessing the banks website, and be able to hit the bot with an API, and have the bot interact with the bank for you.

However, you’d be liable for the losses due to fraud in this scenario

Every single Open Banking implementation I know also requires everyone to go through a useless certified middleman (eg. Plaid, GoCardless, ...) instead of letting people use the APIs directly

Brazil did PIX which in that case the middleman is the government and everyone got to benefit from

Isn't PIX a payment scheme?

Open banking is slightly different, as it's more about account access (although with read+write access, you can kind of build it into a payment scheme as well, although it's usually clunky).

You're right, they are actually one step ahead and into what is now called Open Finance and aims at extending Open Banking beyond the original vision.

The brazilian central bank has a page about it[1]

[1] https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/openfinance

would encourage you to read up about how the rest of the world has solved this

When you say rest of the world, what countries exactly do you mean? I'm from the Czech Republic and the process is also insurmountable for a regular company. You either go through a middleman or you can apply for a license (only 4 companies in the entire country ever got it and it costs upwards of $50k in legal fees just to file the application).

Can you just link us to the relevant pieces? I rather not search on my own and read wall street propaganda on why it's bad (which is what I'm finding and not interested in).

Here's a McKinsey report on Pix, Open Banking, and Open Finance in Brazil[1]

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/br/~/media/mckinsey/locations/south...

Why don't you just tell us, rather than give us homework?

One problem here with the protocols is the field isn't yet so stable. Most people are copying OpenAI's endpoint, and so you have "OpenAI compatible", but there are always little hairs on it. Case in point, OpenAI itself no longer offers multiple basic inference options on their new models. Can't pass temp, get back logits, etc. on anything after GPT 4.1. It's not a total zoo and Open Router is pretty easy but everything is just enough a special snowflake that models aren't a commodity. Maybe later though.

Agreed, though that's not a reason to discourage building it or putting it forward. That's more the reason why a protocol would be beneficial, we are ending up with price wars and middlemens everywhere because we're racing.

Feels the same - businesses from pizza shops to eCommerce sites will be arguing with not their credit card provider about transaction fees, but their AI provider (who supports all 3 major networks, including Discovai, Clankers Club Aierican Express

Open banking protocols exist and are widely used but they’re called crypto, which everyone on HN hates for some reason

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