I wonder how many of the use cases for a retail banking API would be simply satisfied by just allowing customers to request a weekly email with a CSV transaction file attached in a sensible format?
Teller – API for your bank account
191–200 of 282 posts
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#192I wonder how many of the use cases for a retail banking API would be simply satisfied by just allowing customers to request a weekly email with a CSV transaction file attached in a sensible format?
Banks should most definitely do this. Or maybe provide a link to a CSV file behind a login-wall (so the details passed over email can't be poached as easily)
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are no official client libraries, no minimal examples, different banks only support certain versions etc. etc. etc. Sounds just like any other API, from most REST APIs to messengers. HBCI is a lot better designed, and a lot easier to work with than the many different messengers that exist on phones nowadays. Everything is documented, everything is specified, and you have a stable API. Try getting something li…
What do you mean English being the lingua franca is not a good thing? Do you mean it's bad, or it just is what it is? I think there's benefit to having a universal language, but it doesn't have to be English...
I'm betting on a symbolic referential language as becoming the defacto standard for programming binary machines. From my cursory glance at Mandarin, I see a lot of similarities with expressing code.
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#194Earlier 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…
> I'm already doing bank screen scraping for myself Any tools you recommend, or is it all hand-rolled?
The best option I found (for read-only access) was chromedriver > download CSV statement > process that into your own database.
Using minimal standard screen scraping will be hard because most bank apps are a complicated mess of client and server side processing using ancient tech. After many tries, I just used python+chromedriver and that's doable in ~100 loc per bank.
CSV statements because OFX and others are a complete mess in most cases. I haven't seen a single compliant and correct file so far. (This may be AU specific)
Own database / spreadsheet so you have a local copy you can easily filter on. Obtaining specific date range from a bank may be an interesting challenge. I default to importing last 30 days every day with duplicates detected using a hash(date-description-amount-idx) where idx increases for every date-desc-amount duplicate.
So far I'm happy. Actually I'm in the process of writing a post about it - will submit sometime next week most likely.
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#195Engineer at MX here! We have a similar product for US and Canadian banks called Atrium. More info here: https://atrium.mx.com/home NOTE: I saw a few people mentioning Plaid and Quovo so I thought it would be appropriate to mention our product.
Didn't Morningstar just sell you to a bank though?
Is your product still going to be on the open market in 6 months time?
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Some banks (Cap One 360 formerly ING Direct) allow you to generate a site-specific passphrase, so you would limit your exposure if Mint got hacked. However, the whole concept of something like Mint is really read-only access, and I wish that site-specific passphrase had that as well.
Mint is readonly, but the possibilities explode when you are given RW and event processing access to your money. You could already do some cool things of you buffer your accounts between 2 cards. But you can't straight up sent transactions with code, or you're own "automated" savings plans, or social graph triggers/input based on transactions. So many cool possibilities, banks need to step up or collaborate on an engineering effort to produce a secure ApI system and infrastructure.
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#197Earlier 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…
I like how Jude solved the problem of the password. They do all the scraping on the phone. So no password is stored on their servers. https://blog.jude.io
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#198I think I noticed a similar venture in Indonesia: https://brank.as/
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#199Sorry for the newb question but a quick google didn't yield the results I was looking for. What is the attack vector here that "screen scraping" would exploit?
Re: Teller – API for your bank account
#200Yet another man-in-the-middle collecting a fee from each transaction?