41–50 of 61 posts
Remember when Simple was going to offer an API and provide a path forward for this problem [1][2]? Never happened [3], speaks to challenges of financial data still I guess. [1] http://www.programmableweb.com/news/banksimple-banking-servi... [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/simple-api [3] https://www.simple.com/api
Banks have been purposefully limiting customers' view of electronic data for years, first by eliminating running balances about 10 years ago and then by limiting online data to 90 days. They do this because confused customers are more likely to pay fees such as overdraft fees, which is where retail banks make most of their money. Mint complied with the banks' demand to not display running balances but they do display…
No, in an ideal world there would be much more competition between banks, forcing them to offer better services in order to keep their customers.
Fuck it, I am going to build an open source project with the sole goal of automating access to all of these sites with selenium or something. Get ready for war(in the nice, data science-y way)
We're on Wells Fargo who are also doing this. Does anyone have an alternative banking solution? We aren't eligible for USAA. I'd love to keep local free ATM withdrawals, and I have no idea how depositing cash works for online only financial services.
Wait a minute. From ITS data? From Bank of America's data? I think they mean from the customer's data. Data that the customer specifically authorized these services to access.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what these "finance sites" already do. That's why you have to enter your bank username and password to use them - they just scrape the website. Incidentally, I have never used one, because that requirement is completely insane.
Why is that insane? It's inelegant, but it's not functionally different than having an API and a system for registering API keys. Either you trust the aggregator or you don't; if you don't you shouldn't give them access to your data either way. If they do something they shouldn't with your data, they'll be ruined if it becomes public. (Of course there's a huge gray area of things they could do that you wouldn't like,…
No, it's completely different. The entire point of keys is avoid having to store credentials, it has nothing to do with permissioning. In the case of Mint etc., they have to store credentials because there is no token/key system being provided from the banks (ie: oAuth). In the case of something like oAuth creds are never sent to the 3rd party.
And the ironic part of this is if they banks simply provided something like oAuth then they would have MUCH more control over who they worked with and have an easier time managing 3rd party data.
Fuck it, I am going to build an open source project with the sole goal of automating access to all of these sites with selenium or something. Get ready for war(in the nice, data science-y way)
They've open sourced much of their code. Take a look at https://github.com/wesabe/ssu and the other projects in that organization.
Banks have been purposefully limiting customers' view of electronic data for years, first by eliminating running balances about 10 years ago and then by limiting online data to 90 days. They do this because confused customers are more likely to pay fees such as overdraft fees, which is where retail banks make most of their money. Mint complied with the banks' demand to not display running balances but they do display…
> In an ideal world a government regulator would step in and ensure data access and privacy. No, in an ideal world there would be much more competition between banks, forcing them to offer better services in order to keep their customers.