rmesters

Last year when Apple acquired UK open banking startup Credit Kudos there was a lot of speculation on how Apple was going to use the open banking data technology.

Frankly I’m quite excited to see Apple use it to advance their financial health tracking capabilities.

With the bank account data APIs now being available across Europe, I hope we’ll see Apple roll this out in more countries.

GoCardless has an API that’s connected to 2.3k banks in Europe and UK.

Free to use (up to a limit). Not open source though.

Link: https://gocardless.com/bank-account-data/

[I work at GoCardless]

The article does not mention this, but much of the fraud can be removed by switching to bank payments (eg open banking payments) or by using the likes of BNPL.

It’s nuts how much effort goes in to trying to make credit cards work for the internet when they clearly were made to serve a different purpose.

Nordigen (nordigen.com) | Latvia (Riga) | Python Developer, Product Owner | Hybrid Remote (in Latvia)

Nordigen is an open banking platform - we help fintechs to connect to consumer and business bank accounts in Europe for banking data. We're a team of 100 people based in Riga.

Apply here: https://careers.nordigen.com/#section-jobs

I'm one of the founders.

Depends. There's a bunch of providers (eg Yodlee) that ask for bank credentials (previously on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655712) Akoya in US and most European providers use real bank APIs.

Here's two free solutions you can use for bank data sync (Nordigen & Saltedge): https://docs.firefly-iii.org/data-importer/install/nordigen-...

Shameless plug: OP mentioned Plaid as a way to sync bank accounts, but if anyone wants to use a Plaid alternative in Europe, check out Nordigen (it's free).

Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders.

It's happening already: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/39905/cma-writes-to-bar...

Unfortunately, this is still common in Europe: https://sifted.eu/articles/open-banking-finance-battle/

In U.S. most "open banking" is still done via asking people to share their banking passwords.

Open banking (the actual regulated type in UK and EU) replaces (1) the need to rely solely on credit bureau data to understand someone's creditworthiness, which is often faulty or incomplete (2) the need to share paper/PDF bank statements (3) the need to share banking credentials with tech companies that do "open banking powered by screen scraping".

Because open banking is regulated, consumers now have a layer of protection that they didn't have before. And more people can prove their actual creditworthiness (as opposed to whatever credit bureaus think their creditworthiness is).

Full disclosure: I'm a cofounder of Nordigen, a freemium open banking platform. Views biased.

Congrats on the launch - what you've built is incredibly cool. When do you plan to add European investment accounts?

I cofounded Nordigen (Plaid competitor in Europe) and we use PSD2 bank connections, which are great for payments data but do not cover investment data, which is less than ideal. Aggregating OAuth APIs for European brokerages would make so much sense.

"It uses a novel underwriting process, which links with a user’s bank account to determine credit limits based on cash flow." Uses Plaid: https://x1creditcard.com/legal/privacy

Actually, the article uses "open banking" correctly in this case. The author believes that if all banks used open sourced tools for exposing their data via APIs (as opposed to building everything from scratch), we'd have more connectivity - which is true.

In Europe, for example, there's 6,000 banks and there's at least thousand different interpretations of what is a PSD2-compliant API, which makes connectivity hard - you have to use an API aggregator to connect to all these APIs (unless you want to connect to each API separately). If they all just used open source libraries, we'd have less APIs to connect to, which means better connectivity.

I wonder how this could work in practice. A Gov entity will have to connect to some bank APIs to streamline the monitoring? Most banks don't have APIs to connect to. It would pretty wild if the Gov had to ask people to share their bank passwords and then had to screen-scrape the data from their accounts to "establish a connection".

Exciting to see Israel potentially joining the list of countries where open banking is regulated. PSD2 (Europe's open banking law) has made a lot of things in Europe much simpler, like being able to transfer account data from your bank to any third party app. And the bank APIs are free, which is amazing for developers and fintech startups.

Australia and Brazil are also now following this direction with their own open banking implementations.

Coming real soon. If you sign up to the platform, you can get updates on our coverage as we're ramping up in Croatia.

Regarding "1. Download transactions from your bank" - to avoid having to deal with PDFs, it's possible to use account aggregators to fetch your own bank data in Python-friendly formats like JSON.

We have this feature at Nordigen (I'm the cofounder), where we allow developers to download their bank statements in JSON format from 1,000+ European banks (free): https://nordigen.com/en/blog/download-your-bank-statement-js...

There is a new alternative to Plaid that is created by a network of banks. Is the service live and well or is it just a concept? Has anyone tried it?

For context: https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottharkey/2021/05/20/the-grea...

It's exciting to see open banking taking shape in India. I'm based in Europe and the fact that we have regulated and free open banking (under PSD2 law) is a game-changer for fintechs and developers. Instead of having to build/use hacky screen scraping solutions and ask end users to share their banking passwords, all major banks have real APIs that allow consent-based access to account data and to initiate payments.

On a side note, there was a recent study by McKinsey that estimated that open banking data will be worth 4-5% of India's GDP by 2030, which is a crazy amount of value: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-i...

Hi everyone - cofounder of Nordigen. I wanted to show a hobby project we did to showcase how open banking APIs in Europe work. This Telegram bot allows you to connect your real European bank account (from a list of 1,800 banks) to Telegram and check your account balance from the messenger without logging in to your online bank.

Feedback is super appreciated!

To comment on the author's point "01 Create a Compelling Narrative", having a decent flow for a pitch deck is super underrated. I have a feeling that these days VCs look at pitch decks like HR looks at resumes - the initial screening is probably less than a minute so a bad flow can "kill the vibe" instantly. (I'm not a VC, correct me if I'm wrong).

This is the best template that I have seen for creating a decent flow: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-e...

Many BNPLs emphasise that they don't require a credit check. This is fascinating.(1) It highlights how big of a problem credit bureaus are (i.e. there's a significant-enough group of people that want to bypass credit checks to get a loan) and (2) it shows how you can totally build a lending business that doesn't need "traditional credit data".

The great think about PSD2 is that it comes with a bunch of laws and regulators are generally good at making banks compliant. An API that's not working is a non-compliant API and banks get it. PSD2 came in to force in Sept, 2019 and 2 years later all the major retail banks in all EEA countries work have fully operational APIs.

One major limitation is that PSD2 only regulates access to payment accounts, but doesn't mandate access to credit cards, investment accounts, savings accounts etc. This is why screen scraping (to everyone's dismay) is still used - to "expand" what's possible with real bank APIs.

It's true that the 6,000 banks in Europe have different standards, but the fact that the APIs exist and work and that the regulator is enforcing the use of real APIs (as opposed to screen scraping) is worth the effort to integrate each of the banks.

I work at Nordigen and we integrated with 1,500+ banks in less than 8 months. Some APIs took hours to integrate, some took a few weeks, but the fact that it was possible at all is IMO gamechanging.

If you're based in Europe or UK, Nordigen has a completely free API do exactly what you described (I'm one of the cofounders).

We're connected to 1,500 EU/UK banks and you can connect your bank account to your script/app without any license, certificates or any fees. We don't charge for accessing banking data, we only charge for complimentary data enrichment services like transaction categorisation.

https://nordigen.com/

Cofounder of Nordigen here. We built a completely free API to allow small companies check what money comes in, no additional license needed (it's done on the back of our AISP licence). We're connected to more than 1,000 banks in Europe. Here's the link: https://nordigen.com/en/products/account-information/

Hi everyone, cofounder of Nordigen here. We made a tutorial to showcase how Siri can be connected to a bank account to check your account balance. To make this happen we used iOS Shortcuts app + our open banking API.

Would love to hear your feedback.

In Europe, all 6,000 retail banks have working APIs and it's possible to connect to banks without username/password sharing. The APIs are completely free to use under the PSD2 regulation. This approach of regulated open banking (i.e. regulator asking banks to build APIs) should eventually eradicate any password sharing in Europe. I hope to see this in US at some point as well.

"New service that will let millions of small business employees get easy access to employment and income verification services" It feels so very old school to have to share a data dump with a single "trusted third party". 1. There's plenty of payroll API aggregators out there. Launching a more powerful Intuit API would have sufficed. 2. People can already use open banking to verify their employment/income levels with their bank account.