Live data from Hacker News

Teller – API for your bank account

blog.teller.io

271–280 of 282 posts

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#271

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.

The level of bugs and slowness in Quicken is mind bending. I've been using Quicken since it ran in MS-DOS and I've watched it get slower and buggier every year. My latest version (Quicken 2016) literally takes seconds to tab between fields and often does not keep a correct tally balance until I close the check register view. I only have a year of data in it (I thought the slowness might have been due to importing my…

First, Quicken was sold to a private equity firm at the beginning of last year, so you can't really blame Intuit for it anymore.

Second, even before it was sold, it was like Intuit's vestigial tail. It was an important part of the evolution of the company, but it didn't fit into what Intuit was trying to do and was largely ignored inside the company. Even before they announced plans to sell it, it felt like the kitchen table they keep at headquarters...something that's there to remind people of Intuit's past but feels really out of place with its present.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#272
post #265

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…

what is FICDS? What does it mean "quickbooks online is decades old"?

> what is FICDS?

Financial Institution something something Service. It's the internal initialism name for the service that communicates with financial institutions on behalf of the applications that need to pull transactions and other information.

> What does it mean "quickbooks online is decades old"?

The project was started in the late 90s. It's as messy a codebase as you'd expect to find when you've got close to 20 years of commits.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#277
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business perspective? Yes. If you go out of business it's game over, and it's unreasonable to expect them to provide legal advice. That said, I don't think the business model on display here is tenable at all and I don't think it will be successful. I certainly wouldn't sign on for this, way too risky.

On the other hand, if the only way you can stay in business is by deceiving your own customers, what you are running is a scam.

I wouldn't say they're being deceptive. I don't see them making guarantees, and their ToS is as clear as it is scary.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#278
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you added a lot of detail around a core message of "yes, you may be violating your bank's ToS by using our service, please verify this by reading through page upon page of legalese in your spare time." Well... no thanks. I (and likely many others) would only consider using such a service if I had a guarantee, both from you and my bank, up front. from your ToS: >"We are not liable for any loss or…

At least in the U.K. Banks are starting to provide API's so bookkeeping platforms can securely download bank feeds without having to give a 3rd party login credentials.

Sure, and when they're in place (well, a US version I suppose) I would consider using a service like this. Until then, no way.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#280
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?

I hand-rolled a wells fargo scraper recently using the haskell webdriver package and Selenium. It was working fairly well until they started requiring a captcha - something I've never seen as a human user. I'm not quite sure what triggered that or how to get around it.
Post reply on HN