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Teller – API for your bank account

blog.teller.io

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Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#41

Post by bastijn »

smaili wrote: post #30

How many times have you thought to yourself “Damn, I really wish my bank account had an API”? Now that's an intro!

You think? For me as a Dutch guy my only though was "literally never".

We have ideal for payments (https://www.ideal.nl/en/payment-service-providers/) and every bank has its mobile app that is integrating via ideal. So all payments on my phone the app just pops up, I do a finger scan and done. All apps are very decent for all normal banking business. I can't think of any use case I would need to trust a third party with my credentials.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#42

Post by ksherlock »

posix_compliant wrote: post #21
Animats wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your terms: "We are not liable for any loss or damage that may result from your use of our services. This includes any direct, indirect, or consequential losses; any loss or damage caused by tort, including negligence, breach of contract or otherwise." You don't get taken seriously in the financial space with terms like that. You need to accept responsibility for errors and carry errors and omissions insurance. Compa…

Bank of America's assets total over 2 trillion dollars. I would imagine it's easier for large financial institutions to create such strong guarantees for its users.

Marc came to our office at midnight and read the letter I’d written to our community about the Airbnb Guarantee, and the two changes he made changed the company forever. I’d said we guarantee five thousand dollars for property damage, and he added a zero, which seemed crazy.”

-- http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advan...

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#43

Post by rufugee »

JohnnyMneunomic wrote: post #29
foodstances wrote: post #19

How is this different than something like https://plaid.com/ ?

Or any different from Quovo ( https://www.quovo.com/ ) if you were pulling both bank data and brokerage data?

First I've heard about Plaid and Quovo. These services seem to be targeted at a developer interested in developing products for others.

I really wish someone would come out with an API service targeted towards someone who would like to manage and query their portfolio of accounts with code. I have tried time and time again to use things like Mint or Quicken to have a consolidated view of my accounts, but invariably I find things that really suck about the service. I'd rather hack together a set of scripts and do it that way, but where to go for the actual access (aside from manually downloading .obx files).

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#44

Post by bruno2223 »

Cool project,

You should make it open source (to grow your bank catalog by the community) with some premium Plan (to earn money of it)

That's the only way to get it worldwide, otherwise, you will have to do MITM attack every single Bank App in order to get their APIs, with is painful and most of the times impossible without valid credentials.

Opensource + Premium is the way to go!

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#46

Post by dnm »

markbnj wrote: post #38
foxylion wrote: post #22

As a German it is hard to believe that such things do not exist yet in other countries. We have a standardized protocol called FinTS which is implemented by most banks. This results in a huge amount of desktop and mobile applications for banking.

As an American who founded a software company in the online banking sector 20 years ago I can tell you that my experience at that time was that banks here had no interest in making it easier for 3rd parties to get between their customers and their own branded offerings. Microsoft and Intuit tried to promote a standard "API" for banking back then (OFC/OFX) that got very little support from institutions at the time and…

Concur. My credit union recently switched the backend processor for their credit card. Now, the only option for transaction download is csv or xls. Welcome back to the 90s.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#48

Post by maxxxxx »

markbnj wrote: post #38
foxylion wrote: post #22

As a German it is hard to believe that such things do not exist yet in other countries. We have a standardized protocol called FinTS which is implemented by most banks. This results in a huge amount of desktop and mobile applications for banking.

As an American who founded a software company in the online banking sector 20 years ago I can tell you that my experience at that time was that banks here had no interest in making it easier for 3rd parties to get between their customers and their own branded offerings. Microsoft and Intuit tried to promote a standard "API" for banking back then (OFC/OFX) that got very little support from institutions at the time and…

I used to use MS Money and it was really great while it worked. Then slowly banks dropped their support and at the moment there is really no easy way to get all your accounts into one database (especially one that you own yourself) other than giving all your password to something like Mint.

There definitely seems to be a trend for more and more proprietary protocols instead of standards.

And we all know that any kind of regulatory action is anti-freedom and job-killing so I wouldn't expect any regulation to happen.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#49

Post by sjtgraham »

jswny wrote: post #25
sjtgraham wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works by using the same private APIs that the bank's own mobile app. We reverse engineer their app, work out the API contract, implement our client, and normalize the data. Reverse engineering mobile APIs is a superior strategy to screen-scraping because: - they already return structured data - the security model for that channel is different, e.g. no need for 2FA all the time so truly unattended use cases are pos…

Not only does this sound potentially illegal but how can you be confident that you will recognize the breaking changes in time to fix them? What if you begin supporting a large number of banks and you can't keep up? Also, will your reverse-engineered use of the mobile API's have any detrimental effect on the user? I imagine the user will be the one authenticated with the API, what if the bank starts to see an influx…

The EU Computer Programs Directive 2009 provides an exemption for reverse-engineering for the purposes of creating inter-operable systems. This directive has been harmonized into UK law (where Teller is domiciled and operates) and Teller satisfies the requirements to be protected by the exemption. We have also developed many novel techniques that do not meet the UK legal definition of reverse-engineering so we have that angle too. This issue has also been looked at by expensive lawyers.

In terms of stability. It actually takes 6-12 months for a bank to get something into production. We are not talking about fast moving organisations here. We have not had a breakage with a supported integration in two years of beta testing.

We take many steps to ensure our traffic does not stand out to banks eager to actively interfere with Teller. Our clients perfectly emulate (100% API compatibility with their own) and make the same API calls in the same order etc. We also only make API calls as a result of user action, i.e. Teller does not poll or cause atypical traffic patterns. Finally have 100s of IP addresses and assign an IP address to a user for a period of time. All of this compounds to make Teller traffic look indistinguishable from their own mobile app traffic. The objective is to make it more likely they will block their own app traffic than block Teller as a string incentive to not interfere their customers' choice to use Teller enabled services.

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