Look into FinTech Sandbox (boston) - they are backed by Devonshire/FMR (aka Fidelity) and provide an incubator-like program for anything fintech-related. Its probably a best place to start if you want to do anything in the banking space and dont have high millions raised already for connectivity alone.
Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
#22I'm working on Teller ( https://teller.io ), which is a universal banking API. We don't support any US banks yet (but we certainly plan to), but we will be publishing a sandbox API in the near future along with the GA release of our production APIs. In the US I recommend you check out Plaid ( https://plaid.com ), although I believe they offer read only APIs. There is also the Open Bank Project ( https://openbankproje…
Thanks for sharing the open bank project. I'd never heard of it. I'm actually working on something similar to you.
It's called POSADA (personal open source automated digital assistant). It's a open source digital assistant. The primary use cases are financial (paying bills, transferring money, etc). It will open source and user hosted. People host their assistant on pre-loaded, plug and play raspberry pi 3s. Hopefully there will be a community of developers that will share integrations (ie, scraping scripts). So if I want my assistant to work with my local bank, I build an intergration and now anyone else that has the same bank can connect to it.
POSADA's logic will be programmable as well. So you can customize when it alerts you, requests confirmation, or automatically transfers money from one account to another to pay a bill.
One of the use cases I'm most excited about is the ability of POSADA to make donations to organization and charities you care about. So rather than setting up an auto-pay thing with a 3rd party, you tell POSADA how much you want to give, how frequently, and can even adjust the amount based on an assessment of your current financial position. The user would be in total control and I hope that will encourage more people to financial support media outlets, open source projects, and other worthy causes on a regular, sustaining basis.
I've got a mobile app prototype that handles two factor authentication and will eventually grow to become the front end of the assistant. I'm currently leveraging the built in speech-to-text capabilities of android phone to allow the user to communicate with their assistant via voice.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
#23Nope, up until earlier this year I worked in the 'innovation lab' of a top 3 US bank, that was supposedly leading in the banking API space (one of current hottest payment companies uses our backend/wholesale services) and we only offer APIs to big customers and not public, let alone a sandbox environment. My impression with all the regulatory and compliance issues it will take a long time (if ever) that banks will re…
Barclays, Citi, or JPM? :) Oh sorry, you were probably under a take-your-firstborn-NDA.
Either way, the internal incubators at leading banks - at least in NYC - are actually very promising. As parent said, almost every bank has agreements/internal APIs, but they are VERY VERY careful with who gets access. Primary issue, aside from privacy/compliance/PII is that transactional data can be mined so heavily for purchasing patterns and thus predicting revenue for publicly traded companies. In fact, there are a couple of startups trying to do exactly this that popped up recently.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
#24I'm working on Teller ( https://teller.io ), which is a universal banking API. We don't support any US banks yet (but we certainly plan to), but we will be publishing a sandbox API in the near future along with the GA release of our production APIs. In the US I recommend you check out Plaid ( https://plaid.com ), although I believe they offer read only APIs. There is also the Open Bank Project ( https://openbankproje…
Thanks for sharing the open bank project. I'd never heard of it. I'm actually working on something similar to you. It's called POSADA (personal open source automated digital assistant). It's a open source digital assistant. The primary use cases are financial (paying bills, transferring money, etc). It will open source and user hosted. People host their assistant on pre-loaded, plug and play raspberry pi 3s. Hopefull…
This is great! I too am working behind the scenes (nothing on Github yet) on a set of scrapers that pull in data from various financial institutions (my bank, a credit union, a CC account, ect.) along with a 'manager' application that recieves results from these scrapers and displays the data to me. That's step 1. Next I'd like to fully automate the paying of my bills and setting up arbitrary actions based on certain conditions. For instance, send money to some investment account when primary checking scraper sees a new ACH deposit from my employer, ect.
Have you opened this up anywhere yet? I'm interested in using some of your ideas and/or contributing to them. :)
Re: Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
#25You're going to have to scrape. I'm working on an open source competitor to Mint. I call it POSADA (personal open source automated digital assistant). People run their own scrapers (plu and play, dockerized rasperry pis) so they don't have to trust their credentials and personal data to a 3rd party. I envision a repository of integrations (ie, scripts for certain sites) so as people create integrations, you share the…
What about Open Financial Exchange (see my previous comment bellow)?
Thanks for sharing this I'd never heard of it. I looked into it and found some useful info on the GNUCash wiki https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settin...
Re: Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing the open bank project. I'd never heard of it. I'm actually working on something similar to you. It's called POSADA (personal open source automated digital assistant). It's a open source digital assistant. The primary use cases are financial (paying bills, transferring money, etc). It will open source and user hosted. People host their assistant on pre-loaded, plug and play raspberry pi 3s. Hopefull…
This is great! I too am working behind the scenes (nothing on Github yet) on a set of scrapers that pull in data from various financial institutions (my bank, a credit union, a CC account, ect.) along with a 'manager' application that recieves results from these scrapers and displays the data to me. That's step 1. Next I'd like to fully automate the paying of my bills and setting up arbitrary actions based on certain…
You may want to check out https://github.com/bankbotsbank/bankbotsbank
Re: Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
#27You're going to have to scrape. I'm working on an open source competitor to Mint. I call it POSADA (personal open source automated digital assistant). People run their own scrapers (plu and play, dockerized rasperry pis) so they don't have to trust their credentials and personal data to a 3rd party. I envision a repository of integrations (ie, scripts for certain sites) so as people create integrations, you share the…
Wow, I had this very same idea recently, but I'm glad someone is already working on it! One of the other problems with Mint is that despite their claims to the contrary, it's not exactly actively maintained. Do you have a git link?
I don't have the code up here yet, but I created a repo. Please follow it and I will have some code up very soon. I really hope once it gets going you'll be a contributor!
Re: Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing the open bank project. I'd never heard of it. I'm actually working on something similar to you. It's called POSADA (personal open source automated digital assistant). It's a open source digital assistant. The primary use cases are financial (paying bills, transferring money, etc). It will open source and user hosted. People host their assistant on pre-loaded, plug and play raspberry pi 3s. Hopefull…
This is great! I too am working behind the scenes (nothing on Github yet) on a set of scrapers that pull in data from various financial institutions (my bank, a credit union, a CC account, ect.) along with a 'manager' application that recieves results from these scrapers and displays the data to me. That's step 1. Next I'd like to fully automate the paying of my bills and setting up arbitrary actions based on certain…
I just created a repo. Please follow it , as I will have the code I'm working on up there very soon. I would very much welcome any contributions you may have!
https://github.com/ShamariFeaster/posada
We are basically on the same page. POSADA's logic interface has a concept of a plan which is composed of plan actions.
Users will be able to build plans that get executed everyday. for example, you could tell POSADA check you bank account daily and make sure any outstanding checks or withdrawals are adequately funded. If not, you're plan could tell POSADA to try transferring from you savings or alerting you on mobile if it is unable to fund the withdrawal.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
#29In practice, everyone uses products by companies like Yodlee, they barely work and have a ton of production bugs and they're expensive but they sort of get the job done and they "work" almost everywhere.
Re: Ask HN: Is there any US bank with a sandbox or API?
#30This was the business model for Standard Treasury before they got acquired by Silicon Valley Bank. If you want details, you should talk with Dan Kimerling, one of the founders.