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Teller – API for your bank account

blog.teller.io

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Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#251

Post by sjtgraham »

dharma1 wrote: post #227
thwarted wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey Jouni, meeting them today. Will mention you and connect.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#252

Post by sjtgraham »

johnlbevan2 wrote: post #245

Is there a test / mock instance, allowing you to call services connecting to dummy bank accounts? i.e. Some people may be concerned about trying out the API on their own accounts during the early stages, or if any update services are added in future. Also it enables those not banking with a supported bank to develop against the service.

A sandbox is planned.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#253

Post by [deleted] »

skirsch wrote: post #244

Early on at Token, we looked Teller as a possible solution to getting to market quickly. We found two things: 1) the lawyers told us to stay clear (huge greyzone) and 2) the banks themselves didn't want to engage with us using teller even if it sped up development time. We even brought stevie in talk to our lawyers to make his case. He failed to convince them. Finally, we inquired about the price. Stevie was elusive…

[deleted]

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#254

Post by [deleted] »

fredsted wrote: post #86
sjtgraham wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Seems pretty sensible. I hope banks will realise that open APIs are a good thing, and if they don't start getting their shit together, they'll be left behind. Our whole financial infrastructure is so needlessly complicated. Why can't it all be JSON APIs?

[deleted]

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#255

Post by jasonsync »

jessriedel wrote: post #69
mistermann wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should come visit Canada, the level of service we get from our oligopoly of banks would make you cry. They would NEVER support a service like this as it would possibly make their customers happy.

Although I agree that this criticism of Canadian banks is probably broadly true, note that the banks did manage to coordinate on Interac, a quite serviceable standard for sending money electronically between private parties.

Canadian banks have been quietly dropping the Interac network in favour of co-badged cards that use the VISA network behind the scenes. Your interact card says Visa on it now, because the debit transaction might be routed through Visa's network instead.

I'm guessing the benefit to banks is lower fees or perhaps even monetization through transaction data sharing with Visa?

This of course breaks Interac features like Interac online.

Last time I opened a bank account and got a co-badged Interac card I immediately asked them if I could get an "Interac Only" card. At first they had no idea what I was talking about, but a few phone calls to head office later, and they were able to re-issue new debit cards without the Visa co-badge. Interac online works, and I feel better not sharing purchase data with Visa.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#256

Post by danpalmer »

whockey wrote: post #165

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 c…

> Teller... supports the top couple banks.

> Plaid... supports thousands of financial institutions.

While this is technically correct, I feel this is a little disingenuous. In the UK we have a far concentrated banking industry, at least in retail banking, in that the vast majority (I'd guess >99%) of current accounts or similar are held with maybe 6-7 well known high-street banks. We also do not yet have a shared banking API format.

In the US, there are a very large number of smaller credit unions, and many banks/credit unions support the same API format (that I believe Mint.com etc use), and have done for a long time.

So I feel this is disingenuous because a) there are fewer banks to integrate with in the UK, and b) the game of integrations here is much tougher.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#257

Post by kuschku »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #149
rodgerd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> german-language-only Ah the horror. Last week it was bleating that German laws are written in German, this week it's bleating that German bank documentation is written in German.

English is the working language of software development, so it does make a degree of sense to bemoan the fact that the API documentation is only available in German.

Not really in Germany. Lots of documentation is German only, in some german games (most notably the Anno series) even the scripting languages’ keywords were German ("wenn" instead of "if", "solange" instead of "while", etc).

And even in huge codebases such as SAP, most comments are still German.

Yes, modern codebases are often written in english, but that’s not everywhere.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#258

Post by p47 »

rodgerd wrote: post #123
sparkling wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/fi…

> german-language-only Ah the horror. Last week it was bleating that German laws are written in German, this week it's bleating that German bank documentation is written in German.

It's possible for a government to be more open for non speakers of local languages.

Swiss Federal Government provides english translation of documents. https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19920153/...

It's not legally binding, but for education and information purposes works great.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#260

Post by curun1r »

tempestn wrote: post #223
curun1r wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 currenc…

Heh...you're talking QBD. That's the true dysfunction of Intuit. It's the product Intuit doesn't want you to use. They want customers to transition to QBO and only "maintain" Desktop because many customers refuse to "upgrade" to Online. I never met a single employee who was currently working on QBD. A product that accounts for more that 1/4 of their revenue and they had literally no engineers participating in company events, or at least disclosing what product they worked on. Hell, I met the entire Quicken for Mac team at one point.

My favorite WTF for QBD: The data upload was literally just using the replication feature of the embedded Sybase database. One of the Distinguished Engineers that I worked with, "I worked on that feature and I probably know more about how it works than anyone and I can't get it to work reliably.

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