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My business has bank accounts in four countries, and none of these banks provides a scriptable way to access transaction data.

My current solution is to manually download data from each acount for processing, but when I get some play time I want to see how the bank apps communicate, and attempt to turn this into an API. Anyone had any success with this approach?

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Take a look at Weboob (http://weboob.org). It's an attempt to create a well-defined uniform API for websites lacking one. I wrote a few modules for it, and they're scraping 4 banks and 4 shops on a daily basis for last few months.

As I see it, upside of this approach is that you can scrape pretty much everything you can open in your browser. Downside is that you have to update your scraper every time website changes. From my personal experience this happens at least once a month.

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