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Teller – API for your bank account

blog.teller.io

221–230 of 282 posts

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mint is probably the one you don't have to worry about. The service that stores credentials and scrapes bank sites is the same one that powers TurboTax and QuickBooks. Intuit spends a lot of money keeping that service secure and they're well aware of how catastrophic a breech would be. In short, that service is run out of private datacenters, not publicly available. You'd have to compromise not just Mint/TurboTax/Qui…

I don't know, if the general level of bug-ridden-ness of their products is any indication, I wouldn't put much stock in their security. There are glaring bugs in Quickbooks for example that persist year after year, having been reported repeatedly, even as they continue to release a new version every single year with various visual tweaks and seemingly not much else.

QuickBooks, even the online version, are decades old and have major issues that prevent the teams from getting much done. They took a year to do clean-up and basically didn't introduce any new features. Not much got done just due to the complexity of changing anything without causing problems.

FICDS, on the other hand, was spun up more recently and is in much better shape. I wouldn't look at an application like QBO and see much that would inform a behind the scenes service like FICDS.

The more interesting product, to me, is TurboTax. The seasonality of it allows Intuit to basically rebuild it from the ground up every year. It's really a different mindset on the San Diego campus (where TT is developed) and in Mountain View (where QBO is developed). San Diego is much more willing to take (non-security) risks with the product because small changes can add up to big wins. I remember a talk by one of the guys in charge of A/B testing on TT who said that a tenth of a percentage point increase in conversion rate was good for tens of millions in added profit.

Contrast that with QuickBooks, where the difficulty to use is actually a feature. Accountants spend years learning the app and learning the work arounds for those bugs you mentioned. That knowledge and experience becomes a barrier to entry into the field and a job skill that they're compensated for. The result is that QB/QBO is aimed at accountants with years of experience in the product. Their livelihood depends on it and they don't like change. So the teams there do as little as possible that can cause problems and know that they'll still get good reviews if the get almost nothing done so long as they don't cause problems.

It's deeply disfunctional and yet explains why you can put a lot of trust in FICDS. They too have had bugs for years. For example, they don't save cookies between scraping sessions and so are always an untrusted browser to the banks. I have at least two accounts that constantly send me 2FA tokens whenever Mint tries (and fails) to sync. But no one gets fired for not fixing bugs. You get fired for compromising the security or stability of the service, and the easiest way to not do that is to push as little possibly vulnerable code to prod. It's the anti-Zuckerberg environment...move slow and don't break things.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#222
post #196
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eng…

Mint is read only but it's not clear the site-specific password is likewise readonly.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, if the general level of bug-ridden-ness of their products is any indication, I wouldn't put much stock in their security. There are glaring bugs in Quickbooks for example that persist year after year, having been reported repeatedly, even as they continue to release a new version every single year with various visual tweaks and seemingly not much else.

QuickBooks, even the online version, are decades old and have major issues that prevent the teams from getting much done. They took a year to do clean-up and basically didn't introduce any new features. Not much got done just due to the complexity of changing anything without causing problems. FICDS, on the other hand, was spun up more recently and is in much better shape. I wouldn't look at an application like QBO a…

I suppose you could have a point about the fact that (good) accountants know the work-arounds. And many of the bugs are annoyances and UI things rather than critical stuff. There are some that will really bite you (meaning, result in incorrect accounting) if you're not familiar with them. For example, the home currency adjustment in the multi-currency mode skips accounts with a current balance of 0 in foreign currency, even if the balance in home currency is non-zero, and so an adjustment is needed. If you know that, you can go in and do those ones manually (although it's a PITA), but if you don't, your taxes will be off. That seems like something that should not be allowed to persist in accounting software. It's the most glaring example I can think of, but there are others.

Ha, actually, one more - the only way to change the date format in invoices (from mm/dd/yy to YYYY-mm-dd for instance) is to change the overall Windows OS setting. That's crazy enough, but what's worse is, when you do that, it screws up the dates of many pre-existing, closed transactions in your company files. Fortunately in my case (iirc) it reset those dates way in the future, so I was able to find and fix them manually. But I mean, seriously...

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#226
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 com…

Looking forward to that blog post since we need to solve something similar.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#227

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…

We want to help banks deliver these APIs ... The market can't wait for the banks, developers and users want new choices, apps and service now. It was my understanding that the YC-backed company Standard Treasury (acquired by Silicon Valley Bank in 2015) was trying to do this. I don't know where they went with this or what happened (although I believe there was techcrunch write-up about them and the purchase by SVB).…

slight tangent - anybody have a contact at SVB?

We are building a better front-end for any bank on top of Teller (or any other banking API) - http://bixtr.com.

I have some friends who use SVB but they all agree on needing a a much better front-end experience - so would like to help them.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#228

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…

We want to help banks deliver these APIs ... The market can't wait for the banks, developers and users want new choices, apps and service now. It was my understanding that the YC-backed company Standard Treasury (acquired by Silicon Valley Bank in 2015) was trying to do this. I don't know where they went with this or what happened (although I believe there was techcrunch write-up about them and the purchase by SVB).…

[deleted]

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#229
post #181

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…

> I'm already doing bank screen scraping for myself Any tools you recommend, or is it all hand-rolled?

Coming from a slightly different angle but it may be of use, I wrote a chrome browser extension that automates logging into banks and other financial sites. It also scrapes the balances once logged in to provide a net worth total. It currently works on around 25 banks (mainly UK). You can also build your own logins and all passwords/private data are stored encrypted in the browser.

I wrote it as I just spend too much time digging out passwords all the time and the usual crowd like LastPass are a) stored online and b) fail to login automatically to complex input sequences like banks.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#230

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.

My understanding is that the EU PSD2 regulation indeed is supposed to make banks adhere to a standardised API. That being said, I wouldn't expect a super easy to use REST api with documentation powered by readme.io.

No, they're just told to implement the technical means so that the user can decide what to do with their personal data. This probably means some kind of API but any bank is allowed to implement them in any way they like.

That's obviously and opportunity for Teller, Figo.io and other players, they can perform legit aggregation just swapping out their scraping for bona fide API access.

But the situation is more complex... even banks can become aggregators for other banks if their customers want... These are interesting times.

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