71–80 of 113 posts
Why would anyone ever want to let a 3rd party company manage their bank account? I barely trust my bank yo do that... I'm afraid that some companies will try to force it upon customers as well. Starting with: "If you allow us to manage your purchase it will get even faster (oh and we get access to all of your financial info), and you also get a useless gadget!"
People said the said the same about ATMs. They were wrong.
> Open Banking is a term that describes a secure set of technologies and standards that allow customers to give companies other than their bank or building society permission to securely access their accounts. Does it have to be another company or will I be able to write my own software that has access to my bank account?
Wow, the UK is really embracing technology. You can do so much electronically though the Gov.uk website already, and you can even access your NHS medical record via a phone app. Being able to consume banking data via an API will no doubt open up a suite of more useful apps, that can help with managing budgets and planning for the future etc.
WTF? What is open about a system that only very few organisations can use? Imagine in the paper world, now you not only can ask the bank how much money you have, you can also authorize other companies to look at your account statements for you ... but noone got the idea that maybe you, the account holder, should be able to get a copy of the account statements? It seems we are still at the "reading and writing is for…
If you wanted to run a startup that ran APIs which bank customers could use this bill would presumably make that possible.
WTF? What is open about a system that only very few organisations can use? Imagine in the paper world, now you not only can ask the bank how much money you have, you can also authorize other companies to look at your account statements for you ... but noone got the idea that maybe you, the account holder, should be able to get a copy of the account statements? It seems we are still at the "reading and writing is for…
Are you sure you can't? Besides the paper statements, I can download my transaction data in a variety of formats including CSV from every bank I've use in the Netherlands.
Obviously, I want a fully machine-readable API to all of my bank's functionality. Which also "downloading transaction data as CSV" does not fit at all if I have to manually log in and download the data. Also, CSV lists of transactions usually are useless for synchronization as they usually don't provide any mechanism to reliably deduplicate transactions and to check for completeness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you wanted to run a startup that ran APIs which bank customers could use this bill would presumably make that possible.
Which is supposed to solve the problem how? Now I as a customer am dependent on the proprietary API of some startup? Or do you expect startups to compete on a standardized API? And why should I have to employ a monk looking through my bank statements to be able to get access to them? Sure that can be a basis for an idiotic hack, but how does that make it a sensible approach?
At least an API. If that's what customers really want, at least now there is chance somebody will provide it.
>why should I have to employ a monk looking through my bank statements to be able to get access to them? Sure that can be a basis for an idiotic hack
Because the banks themselves are completely uninterested in providing API access to you and somebody with a legal team has to shoulder the liability for providing it.
> Open Banking is a term that describes a secure set of technologies and standards that allow customers to give companies other than their bank or building society permission to securely access their accounts. Does it have to be another company or will I be able to write my own software that has access to my bank account?
Why would I ever fucking want to do that "give companies other than their bank or building society permission to securely access their accounts."
Repeat for savings, insurance, whatever.
WTF? What is open about a system that only very few organisations can use? Imagine in the paper world, now you not only can ask the bank how much money you have, you can also authorize other companies to look at your account statements for you ... but noone got the idea that maybe you, the account holder, should be able to get a copy of the account statements? It seems we are still at the "reading and writing is for…
Its a fair criticism in part; but you are a technologist and so want unfiltered access to play with that data. For the vast majority of people that's meaningless - so to be able to share that data with companies offering new and interesting services (AIS sign up is reasonably lightweight, certainly within trivial reach of any startup) is a big step forward. I think we should be encouraging! (Or in other words; your t…
Erm ... WTF?! I'm not sure how explain this as it just seems so obvious, but ... you can, like, use software that other people write on your own computer!? There is no need to have any clue whatsoever of software development nor to share your data with any third party in order to profit from open APIs.
People can use Thunderbird to read and write email without any need to be able to write software because there are open POP3, IMAP, and SMTP specs and you can have POP3, IMAP, and SMTP credentials for your email provider ... how is that meaningless to the vast majority of people?!
> I think we should be encouraging!
Encouraging of what? More centralization of data processing? Less control for the consumer?
> FWIW GDPR is more interesting legislation for what your after
Not at all. That is about data protection, not about machine readable interfaces. First of all, being able to access my data does not in any way allow me to initiate transactions, which is a ciritical part of banking functionality. But also, being able to access data does not at all mean being able to process it using a computer. I can have access to all the data companies store about me now, and most of them will simply send a letter with a printout to fulfill their legal obligations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is supposed to solve the problem how? Now I as a customer am dependent on the proprietary API of some startup? Or do you expect startups to compete on a standardized API? And why should I have to employ a monk looking through my bank statements to be able to get access to them? Sure that can be a basis for an idiotic hack, but how does that make it a sensible approach?
>Or do you expect startups to compete on a standardized API? At least an API. If that's what customers really want, at least now there is chance somebody will provide it. >why should I have to employ a monk looking through my bank statements to be able to get access to them? Sure that can be a basis for an idiotic hack Because the banks themselves are completely uninterested in providing API access to you and somebod…
But I don't want "an API"? I want a non-proprietary API! I wouldn't bother with locking myself into some proprietary startup crap of questionably reliability, then I can just as well scrape the web interface of my bank, that's also a proprietary API of sorts, and I at least don't have to pay yet another party and risk them abusing or leaking my data and myself being unable to figure out who is responsible for failures in the service.
> Because the banks themselves are completely uninterested in providing API access to you and somebody with a legal team has to shoulder the liability for providing it.
... which is exactly why they should be legally obligated to, instead of some idiotic "you have to allow third parties to access your customers' data" laws?!