The Secret API of Banks

#1

Post by gduverger » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#2

Post by eboyjr » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

This is an awesome alternative to scraping your own bank transactions. I'm considering using this technique to automatically add rows to my personal GnuCash MySQL database.

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#3

Post by lgregg » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:23 PM UTC

I'm definitely going to check this out for my credit union.

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#4

Post by bluetidepro » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

I was expecting this to outline how you could actually use various APIs from different banks, but was still pleasantly happy with the actual content of the article. This is a clever idea I had never thought about doing. Kudos to OP!

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#5

Post by beamatronic » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

eboyjr wrote: post #2

This is an awesome alternative to scraping your own bank transactions. I'm considering using this technique to automatically add rows to my personal GnuCash MySQL database.

Is there a good existing framework that can turn emails into events? Some sort of IMAP client ?

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#6

Post by nbap » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:36 PM UTC

Yeah, I've been doing this for a couple of months now. I just happen to use a combination of Gmail filters, IFTTT actions to post to a webhook of a custom app hosted for free at Heroku to parse and send to Google Spreadsheets. It's been serving me well, definitely better than my bank's app.

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#7

Post by fleetside72 » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:40 PM UTC

"please enter a value greater than 0" lol oh well

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#8

Post by dewey » Wed, Aug 08, 2018, 7:40 PM UTC

For those in the EU there's something interesting coming next year, banks need to provide open API to interact with each other:

https://thenextweb.com/worldofbanking/2018/06/27/openbanking...

Already right now in Germany there are a lot of banks that share a common API format which is why there are a lot of banking apps where you can just log into your bank and don't need bank specific apps. It's called HBCI / FinTS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS) and it's great to have that possibility without doing some web-scraping to get your data out.

One example of another german bank API would be:

https://api-docs.fidor.de/v1/introduction/welcome-text