Many banks do not actually include any information in the notifications, because of the unencrypted nature of in-transit email. That is, "There has been a debit on your account" instead of "There has been a debit of X$ from merchant Y".
The Secret API of Banks
21–30 of 257 posts
Re: The Secret API of Banks
#22I hate sounding like a VC jerk, but the banking industry needs some serious disruption.
Particularly in user-facing aspects
Re: The Secret API of Banks
#23Re: The Secret API of Banks
#24For 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…
Is this new initiative strictly for an API between the official banks or there's a chance that a regular company or, let's say a private person, can use it to access its own data & submit transfers?
In a related note, I do hope that the German "lastschriftmandat"/direct debit gets also replaced with something more transparent and with a better control. Similar to an e-invoice concept used by a few other countries like Estonia.
Re: The Secret API of Banks
#25I 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
> I wrote an Android app [1] that intercepted those SMS messages and parsed out the relevant bits.
Sounds like a nice hack, but at a meta level, I find the idea that a mobile platform even allows an app to ‘intercept’ SMS messages to be a little troubling.
Re: The Secret API of Banks
#26For 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…
Is this new initiative strictly for an API between the official banks or there's a chance that a regular company or, let's say a private person, can use it to access its own data & submit transfers? In a related note, I do hope that the German "lastschriftmandat"/direct debit gets also replaced with something more transparent and with a better control. Similar to an e-invoice concept used by a few other countries lik…
It's not completely public, but it's open to all companies and people. Your application needs to meet certain requirements and needs to be approved etc.
Re: The Secret API of Banks
#27Re: The Secret API of Banks
#28I hate sounding like a VC jerk, but the banking industry needs some serious disruption.
The american banking industry, maybe.
One of the ills of VC-mania is the ongoing assumption that a) problems that exist in the US exist everywhere and b) that there are no other problems.
(see also: Uber busting the "taxi monopoly")
Re: The Secret API of Banks
#29I 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
> I wrote an Android app [1] that intercepted those SMS messages and parsed out the relevant bits. Sounds like a nice hack, but at a meta level, I find the idea that a mobile platform even allows an app to ‘intercept’ SMS messages to be a little troubling.
Well, it doesn't. You have to do a lot of things in order to allow it that it's impossible to not know exactly what you're doing. I think it's positive that I am in control of my device when I want to.
Re: The Secret API of Banks
#30Anyone use Firefly III? It uses the Spectre API to allow you to have a self-hosted Mint.