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Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

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Re: Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

#31

Post by germanier »

captainmuon wrote: post #22
phlo wrote: post #15

SOFORT(.com) has built a strong market presence in Germany and is expanding throughout Europe. They basically do the same thing you are talking about: provide an easy "check-out" experience using customers' banking credentials and custom crawlers. The solution is well-liked by merchants. Banks generally don't like it (for obvious security/privacy reasons), but are cautious in actually preventing it. SOFORT actually u…

SOFORTÜBERWEISUNG looked sketchy as hell the first time I tried it. Imagine IMMEDIATEWIRETRANSFER.COM (in capital letters) asking you to enter not only your bank account number, but also your password, and then a PIN from your secret list. The latter is something that the bank tells you to never, under no circumstances, give out, because you can use it to transfer money. I find it really hard to believe that SOFORT d…

The federal antitrust commission intervened after banks filed a lawsuit to stop Sofort from using their websites. The passages of their TOS that forbid using such services are most likely void as they obstruct a free market of payment providers (as seen by the federal antitrust commission).

Personally, I avoid that service but it has the blessing of government agencies from operating that way.

Some banks (e.g. DKB) now started to cooperate with Sofort instead and the German banks will start a similar service themselves this year.

Re: Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

#32

Post by nailer »

dguido wrote: post #11

Because they use OFX for read-only transactions and an HSM to store the passwords: http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/15392/are-there-any...

The bank should provide oauth, with 'see your transactions' as a permission you can revoke later.

Unfortunately, banks are technically backward and don't realise they're dumb vaults yet, much in the same way phone carriers are dumb pipes.

Re: Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

#33

Post by filoeleven »

saluki wrote: post #4

y, I think providing your credentials is a bad idea and haven't done it. This came up in a thread a few weeks ago. I can't believe banks aren't required to provide a read-only access and/or API to your account. That would be a great solution for rolling your own budget tracker and allowing access for services like mint. Does anyone know if any banks have read-only passwords or an api?

ING Direct had this feature, and it's been carried over when that changed to Capital One 360.

https://mint.lc.intuit.com/questions/1057341-known-issue-cap...

Re: Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

#34

Post by vishbar »

jdeibele wrote: post #26

My understanding is that they use http://www.yodlee.com for getting information from your accounts. That's pretty much what everybody does. I turned it off and deleted my data because the bank or brokerage would change something and break the automatic downloads and things would get out of date. I believe banks and brokerages should have two levels of access: one where you can move money and one where you can look bu…

My bank, Capital One 360, has something like this. You can give a read-only access token to an external service and change/disable it at will.

Re: Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

#35

Post by IanCal »

angdis wrote: post #9

Yes, I've been a mint user since well before they were bought by Intuit. I didn't think it was a bad idea, because it is clearly explained that Mint can't make changes to your accounts. It is only used for query. I am under the impression that the banks only allow Mint query capabilities. They've lately released a new service called "Mint Bills"-- which does make changes but that is separate from their main "Mint" se…

> I didn't think it was a bad idea, because it is clearly explained that Mint can't make changes to your accounts.

Mint can do anything that you could do with the same credentials. Unless you have read-only credentials, they can technically make changes using your details.

Re: Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

#37

Post by jacquesm »

I've wondered about this for a long time. It also appears to be in direct contravention of the terms of service for my bank (which mint doesn't support anyway so that's moot), which state that my access information is strictly personal. I wonder if mint ever got hacked and this led to damage for their customers what the liability situation would be.

Re: Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

#39

Post by webjprgm »

jmnicolas wrote: post #29

I wouldn't this is why I chose a non connected financial app on my Android phone. It took me a week of try and miss to find a good one but there's no way I'm going to trust a third party with my banking info. Heck I don't even trust my bank (but admittedly I don't have a choice in the matter). This is also why I don't seriously use Evernote. Yeah I'd love to have all my documents and bills there, but at one point you…

I agree completely.

I'm using "Cha-Ching 2 beta" which was abandoned some 6 years ago when Intuit bought out the company working on it but the beta still works (I owned a copy of Cha-Ching 1 from some software bundle I picked up). The downside is (1) manual entry of every transaction, and (2) no analytics at all. The plus side is I wrote my own scripts to extract data from its Sqlite database so I can do analytics in a spreadsheet.

I definitely don't trust any one company. I don't want my bank or my credit card company to have 100% of my financial data.

Re: Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

#40

Post by aerialcombat »

Not all trust them. Some do, some don't. But services like Mint exist because there are enough who trust out there to keep the service going. 100% trust is impossible for any service. There are people who don't even trust themselves.
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