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Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

root.co.za

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Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

#101

Post by louwhopley »

RickS wrote: post #95
louwhopley wrote: post #54

Founder here :) Feel free to ask me any questions

Hey - I previously worked on a prepaid debit platform that worked slightly farther from the metal here (post-processor). I'm interested in two pieces of data we couldn't get there, but that I had really high hopes for. 1) Dynamic merchant-type filtering before auth. For example, if tom has spent 50$ on food this month, all merchants that identify as "food" will fail auth on further transaction attempts. I'm not sure…

Hey RickS, they are still called MCCs :) (2) is a bit more tricky to get our hands on, at least in South Africa

Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

#102

Post by hasbroslasher »

jsudhams wrote: post #93
s_dev wrote: post #45

People asking about what problem this solves haven't been to South Africa or Zimbabwe which in some ways are ahead of the West in creating cashless societies. The biggest bank is a phone operator and people can send each other money over the phone and from what I understand this is very common. Also interestingly most phones aren't smart phones. It's mostly analog. Banks have a serious incentive to create and encoura…

One of the issue with cashless is that banks/financial service provided making money of of the money i.e. $100 making more than $100 with out adding any real value in fees (100 time circulation). I know time is money in most western countries but my place we do one crop a year and sit idle for 9 months. So time is not a money and we would rather give cash to a person get that much worth of a product. E.g. My sons sch…

The example of your son's school is fine, but imagine that your son lives in another country. Cash has other problems beside being slow. It's insecure - a person could steal your $20 bill from your mailbox or his, or from the Post Office. It's untraceable - if your son's school says "We never got your payment" but your son swears he gave them the cash, you're stuck in a situation where either your son or the school is ripping you off (I'm sure your son would never do that). And last, it takes both time and money to convert cash to another currency. Taking the cash to somewhere where a person can convert it to the preferred currency is bad enough, and then it costs you money on top of it.

Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

#103

Post by louwhopley »

strictnein wrote: post #100
louwhopley wrote: post #54

Founder here :) Feel free to ask me any questions

Your page shows a sample bit of code (the beforeTransaction function) that approves a transaction. Does MasterCard (or whoever) still run their approval magic before that?

What do you mean by their "approval magic"? There are other fraud filters etc built into various places throughout the payments system.

Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

#105

Post by eutropia »

snowwolf wrote: post #34
tarr11 wrote: post #11

What problem does this attempt to solve? Their slack example doesn't seem particularly pressing.

How about streaming your transactions to a budgeting service to approve or deny if you've gone over budget for the month. Or build your own rules to deny certain transactions if you are approaching 0 balance. I think there are lots of use cases you could think of that are custom to you that no bank would ever build.

I think it would be great for every purchase of mine to round up to the nearest $5 or $10 increment and transfer the difference into savings, or have it be percentage based, etc.

Having payments from clients automatically set-aside tax money would be great, too.

Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

#106

Post by bjackman »

sjtgraham wrote: post #41
djm_ wrote: post #33

If anyone's looking for API access to UK high street banks: https://teller.io

Thanks! Founder here. Currently in private beta, but if you're with Santander, Nationwide, RBS, Natwest, Ulster Bank NI, or IOM Bank I can give you access - sg@teller.io.

Have you integrated this directly with the banks or do you take user's login details and scrape the online banking sites (like MoneyDashboard does)?

I would be more than willing to switch banks just to get a read-only API for this kind of thing, if only it was properly integrated (read: I don't have to give my login details to a third party)

Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

#107

Post by jamesrcole »

hasbroslasher wrote: post #91
jamesrcole wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useful new technologies don't always solve obvious problems. Sometimes a more fruitful way of thinking about them is to ask: what might this help enable? And especially considering this not just in terms of an isolated individual using it, but in terms of if it had broad uptake where lots of people were using it. Think of things like the introduction of cars, or the internet. Their actual effect on most people weren'…

I really like this point. It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". But bigger inventions don't solve a small, narrowly-defined problem: they totally change the game. You can't sum up the impact of the automobile, antiseptic or the internet in a sentence, because these inv…

> It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes".

I would also say that if you'd told people about those problems thirty years ago, people might have responded 'but I can already communicate with my team using a conference call' and 'I can already sell items through the classified or flea market'. 'What new problems are these things solving?'

I think that most inventions don't do anything particularly new - the kinds of individual tasks you can do with them could have been done before. What they tend to do is provide greater efficiency. And greater efficiency at scale enables new kinds of things to happen.

E.g. think of youtube. It was possible for people to share videos before the internet. E.g. you could have submitted a description of your video to a printed catalogue, and if people wanted to watch it they'd contact you via the catalogue, so you could send them a copy on VHS. What youtube and the internet does is makes it so much easier -- so much more efficient -- that it makes it practical, and the scale enables all sorts of new things to crop up on top of it.

Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

#108

Post by nickpsecurity »

duozerk wrote: post #15
egeozcan wrote: post #9

I'd like to have something like this for Germany. I am willing to pay 10€/month for a simple API access to my bank account. I need neither hosted code nor push. Just give me remote access for my scripts. Probably I'm asking for the impossible because of the heavy regulation in Germany but just wanted to put it out there.

You can simulate a browser and act as if you're a normal, browser using customer. Encapsulate it and you've got an "API"; though it'll be a bit painful as a lot of banks' web backends are fucked up and you'll need to keep up to date with their changes, but still. I did it for my French bank account at one point (get balance + submit transfer).

Your comment might be the first I've seen justifying the use of Electron. ;)

Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers

#109

Post by jsudhams »

azeirah wrote: post #90
m3ta wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My BofA account has a whole spending habits section with graphics and charts and a ton of features, for free, which comes with my debit account. Why would I want to do all this myself? The only real answer is privacy, but I would just use BTC instead of USD if I wanted privacy anyway, and BTC is already programmable.

> Why would I want to do all this myself? My bank doesn't have this, so that's one reason. Another would be that a third-party could write the code that performs the analysis, you should be able to just download (or purchase, I suppose) their script and use it, so you don't have to do it yourself anyway. This also means it becomes possible to have competition within this space, right now, you can only ever use your b…

Used yodlee multiple banks and works perfect. Can do most of this spend reports and budget part of it.
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