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Teller – API for your bank account

blog.teller.io

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Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#161

Post by martinald »

reledi wrote: post #119
skrebbel wrote: post #50

Dutch mobile-only bank Bunq also published their API pretty recently: https://www.bunq.com/en/api Things are starting to not-entirely-suck in retail banking land. (in Europe, at least - not sure about elsewhere)

Monzo, the UK mobile-only bank, also has an API: https://developers.monzo.com/ Teller is not a bank itself though. I believe it started as a wrapper around banks' private APIs, not sure whether that's still the case.

To be fair, Monzo isn't either. They don't have any of their own infrastructure yet, it's just a third party rebranded prepaid card.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#162

Post by gregable »

viraptor wrote: post #134
sjtgraham wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

> It is also worth mentioning there has never been a single case of fraud or loss attributed to "screen-scraping" This response makes me angry. Every service worth attacking will have security problems at some point. You're running a store of bank credentials, which you have to have access to (as opposed to password managers for example which can store user encrypted data). Given enough time, one of these services wi…

It would be interesting if there were a way to run a local client that holds your credentials and does the screen scraping to send back to this API (or others).

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#163

Post by viraptor »

gregable wrote: post #162
viraptor wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is also worth mentioning there has never been a single case of fraud or loss attributed to "screen-scraping" This response makes me angry. Every service worth attacking will have security problems at some point. You're running a store of bank credentials, which you have to have access to (as opposed to password managers for example which can store user encrypted data). Given enough time, one of these services wi…

It would be interesting if there were a way to run a local client that holds your credentials and does the screen scraping to send back to this API (or others).

Technically, they could provide a self-hosted version. But that may not be a very profitable business. Also, screen scraping needs continuous updating as the bank's interface changes.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#165

Post by whockey »

Hey all - co-founder of Plaid[0]. Congrats to Steve - great to see some innovation across the pond!

There were a bunch of questions about Plaid and the difference. The obvious one is that Teller is UK only and supports the top couple banks, Plaid is US only and supports thousands of financial institutions. If you need both UK and US coverage - since we both have pretty developer friendly APIs - it seems like a nice combo! Steve/Teller have also taken a bit of an antagonistic approach and has not worked with the banks - time will see if this proves successful, but we've taken the approach to work directly with the banks (as investors, clients, data-partners etc.).

Hope that helps and if you have any other questions/comments feel free to shoot me an email at william [at] plaid.com

[0] https://plaid.com

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#166

Post by foodstances »

rufugee wrote: post #43
JohnnyMneunomic wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

I use Plaid for my own bank account access, which I used to replace my own OFX code because my banks kept randomly breaking their OFX interfaces.

Plaid was fine with creating a developer account for just a few bank accounts, they didn't have any minimum or anything.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#167

Post by pjwal »

Can someone explain to me this dichotomy I see with the almost thermo-nuclear war when it comes to copyright protection of total drivel, but when it comes to fin-tech there is literally a flourishing industry of screen scraping typing companies and well-publicized plays like Mint and it's just like a big shrug? How are these companies able to mitigate through the banking companies TOU and such?

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#168

Post by schrijver »

aerique wrote: post #98
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!

I've got a yearly angry tweet that it's totally ridiculous that in $YEAR we do not have an easy, maybe just read-only, way to access our transaction data from banks. (This is for the Netherlands.) At this point I'd take the enterprisey German API over nothing. I'd love our government or the EU stepping in.

The EU has already stepped in—IIRC, starting in 2018, the PSD2 directive will force banks to open up their API’s.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#169

Post by lylo »

martinald wrote: post #161
reledi wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monzo, the UK mobile-only bank, also has an API: https://developers.monzo.com/ Teller is not a bank itself though. I believe it started as a wrapper around banks' private APIs, not sure whether that's still the case.

To be fair, Monzo isn't either. They don't have any of their own infrastructure yet, it's just a third party rebranded prepaid card.

That's not true. They recently received a banking license (https://monzo.com/blog/2017/04/05/banking-licence/) and they have built their own platform (https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-bac...).

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#170

Post by robhu »

jasiek wrote: post #126
kevincennis wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they required to adhere to a standardized API? If not, then I think there's still some utility in a service that can normalize that stuff and provide you with a single, consistent interface.

Nope. They just need to provide "an API". Got a hundred banks? That's potentially 100 integrations you'll need to do - the barriers remain in place an everyone is happy.

True, but there are only four 'big banks' Barclays, HSBC;, Lloyds Banking Group, and The Royal Bank of Scotland Group.

100% coverage might be quite time consuming, but getting most the market is not going to be excessively hard.

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