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The Secret API of Banks

gduverger.com

11–20 of 257 posts

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#11
post #9

I'm not sure I'd feel better about having every single transaction in email. That doesn't seem any more secure to me.

Concerning, but still much better than giving a third party your username and password which could be used to initiate a transfer or something.

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#12
post #6

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.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I heard you right. Did you say you can build a custom app but still use IFTTT?

Here's a link to http://Zapier.com

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#13
post #9

I'm not sure I'd feel better about having every single transaction in email. That doesn't seem any more secure to me.

That really depends on your threat model. If someone already has access to your email account it's game over anyway most of the time. I don't see much of a problem there if you are not worried about your ISP / mail provider taking your data.

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#14
post #12
post #6

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.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I heard you right. Did you say you can build a custom app but still use IFTTT? Here's a link to http://Zapier.com

Thanks but I'm aware of Zapier. The custom app is fairly easy to maintain, I can keep track of changes and it provides total flexibility for my needs in terms of parsing and how to store the data.

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#15
I tried doing something like this, but it didn't work for Bank of America, as their minimum alert level is $100.

When I lived in Slovenia, I could set SMS alerts from my bank there (UniCredit). I wrote an Android app [1] that intercepted those SMS messages and parsed out the relevant bits. Those were the days...

[1] https://github.com/loisaidasam/poor-mans-money-counter

Re: The Secret API of Banks

#16
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 ?

Sendgrid has an inbound parse feature (https://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/Settings/parse.html) which you can use to start building a framework - it takes any inbound email to a domain and forwards it as an HTTP request to an endpoint you specify. Used it for a few projects and its worked great.
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