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Root partners with Standard Bank South Africa to offer programmable bank account

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Re: Root partners with Standard Bank South Africa to offer programmable bank account

#22
post #13
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Banks has to have an open api" are you sure about that ? I thought there was some criteria to be able to use these APIs

Yes but account owner or user will be able to give permission for access to his banking data. So you will be able to use your fav accounting app to fetch data directly from account without doing csv export or hacking something around.

In Germany we have DATEV, which is a company doing exacly that.

Re: Root partners with Standard Bank South Africa to offer programmable bank account

#23
post #3

This is very exciting. In the EU the fintech revolution is also banging the gates, as in 2018 all banks must support a standard protocol, if I recall correctly.

It's called Psd2, strugling to find a good article about it but TLDR; Banks has to have an open api for payments and to check account statuses.

Didn't know that ! It may explain why french bank (like société générale) are starting to offer a way to check other french bank account from their mobile app/website

Re: Root partners with Standard Bank South Africa to offer programmable bank account

#26
post #25
post #5

Founder here - let me know if you have any questions! More details at https://root.co.za/

I'm with ABSA and FnB. Will it initially be only for Standard Bank customers or will you support other banks?

Hi sgt, Root will be available to all developers in South Africa, not locked to SB clients :)

Re: Root partners with Standard Bank South Africa to offer programmable bank account

#28
post #8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called Psd2, strugling to find a good article about it but TLDR; Banks has to have an open api for payments and to check account statuses.

It's generally a "read only" view, i.e. you can get account info etc. Root is a "write" API. So you can actually create and modify transactions.

In the legislation banks has to provide a way to inititate transactions. So its not only to view data.

Re: Root partners with Standard Bank South Africa to offer programmable bank account

#29
post #27

Great idea, really like it. I really wonder why our overpaid German fintech ecosystem is unable to produce this kind of innovation? Is it because of too many regulations within the EU?

> overpaid German fintech ecosystem

In what sense is the German fintech ecosystem overpaid? Don't you earn less than the UK and US?

Re: Root partners with Standard Bank South Africa to offer programmable bank account

#30
post #27

Great idea, really like it. I really wonder why our overpaid German fintech ecosystem is unable to produce this kind of innovation? Is it because of too many regulations within the EU?

> overpaid German fintech ecosystem In what sense is the German fintech ecosystem overpaid? Don't you earn less than the UK and US?

Maybe "overpaid" is the wrong term. I think that VC capital allocation in Berlin is skewed in favor of fintech investments, where most people are setting up some part of the banking ecosystem into their own app and most of them fail hard w/ product market fit even though they got great budgets compared to other b2c industries like eSports etc.
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