Superb. Any chance of supporting Lloyds?
Yes, Lloyds HBOS brands are a high priority.
Teller – API for your bank account
51–60 of 282 posts
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#52How 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…
Ehhh, you totally seem to miss the point. It's not about making a single payment, but automating that without any user interaction in between.
Simple example: I want to build a arbitrage trading bot that can automatically request my bank to wire money to some address so I can have my funds on an exchange topped up. That's not gonna be possible without an API.
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#53As 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.
FinTS (formerly known as HBCI) is horrible and serves as a great example of how not to design a API.
The non-machine-readable german-language-only API specification consist of >800 pages spread across various PDFs[1] full of gibberish. There are no official client libraries, no minimal examples, different banks only support certain versions etc. etc. etc.
[1]
https://www.hbci-zka.de/dokumente/spezifikation_deutsch/fint...
https://www.hbci-zka.de/dokumente/spezifikation_deutsch/fint...
https://www.hbci-zka.de/dokumente/spezifikation_deutsch/FinT...
https://www.hbci-zka.de/dokumente/spezifikation_deutsch/fint...
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#54Earlier 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…
Wow, really? Do the banks know about this? What's to stop them from changing the contract? This is so insanely risky...
It's takes banks 6-12 months to get anything into production. Also breaking APIs to thwart me has to compete with delivering new features to users. When they do change the contract, we know about it. We watch for new app releases, and proactively check.
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#55UK banks don't accept any liability if you give your online banking credentials to a third party. If some fraud was to come about as a result of someone using Teller then they would be out of pocket or has Teller got agreements with the compatible banks to overcome this situation (either by Teller reimbursing the customer or the bank)?
It's the same in France, yet some aggregators (e.g. Bankin) are using those credentials directly (and afaik the risk is handled via some sort of insurance). I'm personally waiting for the PSD II law to be deployed (see https://blog.teller.io/2016/04/26/tauth.html ) in order to have clear-cut protections & boundaries, before leveraging Bankin or similar (Teller) as a SaaS product builder.
How do you actually share your credentials? I assume you have to provide a 2FA-token when logging on?
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#56"We realise that our revenue will most likely be a very long tail with a small number of customers bringing in most of the cash."
Either they or I don't understand what long tail means.
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#57How 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…
Another dutch person here. I can think of plenty of use cases. I'd like to keep track of where my money goes, and have played with programs like GnuCash and Ledger before. The big problem is getting data into them. I have a decent system where I download the CSVs, feed them to a script, and everything gets imported. However this requires me to think about downloading that CSV every month. And my administration lags behind by a month. It's also inconvenient if my system can't automatically identify the receiver, since then I'll have to help it out. Hard to do that when I have to recall where I spent $15 a month ago.
If there was an API I could use to get these details, it would be so much more convenient. Could even build a product around it.
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, Firstly, we don't always need a credential. Some banks provide other auth mechanisms, e.g. EMV CAP. We use this for Barclays and Nationwide. Using Teller might not violate your bank's terms of service, which is why we advise you to read them in conjunction with ours. Furthermore, it is the view of some senior bank people that I speak to that PSD2 will make such clauses in banking terms illegal. It is also worth m…
Anecdotally, I've seen banks claim the reason for $something_bad was a virus on a chromebook. Whether or not there's 'been a single case of fraud or loss attributed to "screen-scraping"', I believe most banks are more than happy to blame you by default and make it difficult/expensive to resolve.
Most people don't really distinguish between viruses and worms, and there's been worms on Unix systems before (hi RTM!)
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Personal Capital is pretty good - their investment service is pretty overpriced, but their free portfolio management tools work most of the time, provide great graphing, and seem to handle all my accounts easily across a variety of banks.
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, Firstly, we don't always need a credential. Some banks provide other auth mechanisms, e.g. EMV CAP. We use this for Barclays and Nationwide. Using Teller might not violate your bank's terms of service, which is why we advise you to read them in conjunction with ours. Furthermore, it is the view of some senior bank people that I speak to that PSD2 will make such clauses in banking terms illegal. It is also worth m…
Anecdotally, I've seen banks claim the reason for $something_bad was a virus on a chromebook. Whether or not there's 'been a single case of fraud or loss attributed to "screen-scraping"', I believe most banks are more than happy to blame you by default and make it difficult/expensive to resolve.
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