Fidor Bank API
docs.fidor.de
docs.fidor.de
Among the supported banks you find the big players, such as Deutsche Bank, Postbank and DKB.
While Fidor has some modern features, such as social payments, they lack behind when it comes to day-to-day features:
Withdrawing cash, which is still very important in Germany, can only be done freely three times a month. After that you pay a rather hefty fee. Fidor also does not offer a Girokarte, which is still the number one payment method in German shops - online and offline.
All the above mentioned banks offer a better service and some even free credit cards with unlimited worldwide withdrawals.
Anyone have any idea why banks are so closed-minded regarding opening up their data via APIs? I suppose, now that I think about it, there are all sorts of regulation hoops that need to be jumped through. Something as simple as "a financial institution requires positive document identification of client to release bank statements", which sounds good on paper, but makes API-enabling an absolute legal nightmare.
1. The data has a lot of value, you need to convince your bank that having a great API is worth more than more rigid control of your interaction (more to them, not to you). 2. As you say, regulatory/legal stuff can be a nightmare. 3. Most first-world banks' internal systems are a bit of a maze given they've been built up over 40 or more years. Making them work safely and sanely with letting anyone code apps against interfaces is not particularly trivial.
The banks will charge a fair amount for this though, and they will do it only for large customer and financial institutions. One reason is that it's one of the thing that they make money from in transactional banking.
One other reason is that it's technically challenging, both for a customer and the bank to set up a secure message interchange, and there is no standard for authenticating the messages, or the sender.(That I know of, that's reasonably sane.)
One other reason is that it's normally a lot of manual work to set up all this for a customer.
It's also expensive to devlop a solution for this. There are a lot of systems that handles different things - ledgers, payment systems, message brokers, authorisation systems, the actual internet banking system, etc. In any case, it's more than one system and it's complex.
Most commercial customers tend to view the transactional part of a bank (payments, accounts) as an "it service provider" and not as a "bank", so things like this will absolutely come, also to USA that seems to be a bit old fashioned in regards to banking.
I want to completely disclose Neocities financing, and lack of API for safely doing this has been a frustrating problem.
Put varnish in front of your API to act as a caching layer and prevent anyone from causing your server to overload the bank API.
check devtools when logged into simple.
It's just sad that the banking infrastructure underneath is still the old legacy BS. Having to answer security questions or relay two-factor auth is insane. I yearn for the days when we can OAuth with our banks!
I do realize that there is plenty of red tape in the world of banking, but it would be great to see a "disruptive" bank service on the net that's actually built for netizens.
We are only serving business customers for now. Feel free to send me a note at brian at seed.co if you have any questions.
Thanks!
We're actively updating them - lots more to come.