Canada calls screen scraping ‘unsecure,’ sets Open Banking target for 2023

“Open” in this case means open standards and access for accredited entities.

Because if you grant access to just anyone, then you’ve created an instant fraudster’s paradise.

The legal requirements in the UK (which you may be talking about, unsure) are not meaningless, they are there to ensure that known parties and known good practice are in use. Open Banking the company is working on ways to help small businesses gain accreditation and may already be able to offer assistance, and while accreditation is not free, it’s only a few £k, hardly enough to break the bank.

As a non-accredited actor, if you have a limited company you can register as a technical service provider for free and develop your product against the sandbox environment.

Oh and you don’t have to negotiate access with each bank either. The whole point is to pre-vet and establish trust ahead of time.

That’s as open as anyone with half a brain should want it to be, given what we know about people’s ability to protect their own finances.

When you loan your money to a bank by depositing ledger dollars or cash - and they, since GLBA in 1999, invest it and offer less than a 1% checking interest rate - and they won't even give you the record of all of your transactions as CSV/OFX `SELECT * FROM transactions WHERE account_id=?`, you have to pay $20/mo per autogenerated PDF containing a table of transactions to scrape with e.g. PDFminer (because they don't keep all account history data online)?

Seemingly OT, but not. APIs for comparison here:

FinTS / HBCI: Home Banking Computer Information protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS

E.g. GNUcash (open source double-entry accounting software) supports HBCI (and QIF (Quicken format), and OFX (Open Financial Exchange)). https://www.gnucash.org/features.phtml

HBCI/FinTS has been around in Germany for quite awhile but nowhere else has comparable banking standards? I.e. Plaid may (unfortunately, due to lack of read-only tokens across the entire US consumer banking industry) be the most viable option for implementing HBCI-like support in GNUcash

OpenBanking API Specifications: https://standards.openbanking.org.uk/api-specifications/

Web3 (Ethereum,) APIs: https://web3py.readthedocs.io/en/stable/web3.main.html#rpc-a...

ISO20022 is "A single standardisation approach (methodology, process, repository) to be used by all financial standards initiatives" https://www.iso20022.org/

Brazil's PIX is one of the first real implementers of ISO20022. A note regarding such challenges: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24104351

What data format does the FTC CAT Consolidated Audit Trail expect to receive mandatory financial reporting information in? Could ILP simplify banking and financial reporting at all?

FWIU, RippleNet (?) is the only network that supports attachments of e.g. line-item invoices (that we'd all like to see in the interest of transparency and accountability in government spending).

W3C ILP: Interledger Protocol. See links above.

Of the specs in this loose category, only cryptoledgers do not depend upon (DNS or) TLS/SSL - at the protocol layer, at least - and every CA in the kept-up-to-date trusted CA cert bundle (that could be built from a CT Certificate Transparency log of cert issuance and revocation events kept in a blockchain or e.g. centralized google/trillian, which they have the trusted sole root and backup responsibilities for).

Though, the DNS dependency has probably crept back into e.g. the bitcoind software by now (which used to bootstrap its list of peer nodes (~UNL) from an IRC IP address instead of a DNS domain).

FWIU, each trusted ACH (US 'Direct Deposit') party has a (one) GPG key that they use to sign transaction documents sent over now (S)FTP on scout's honor - on behalf of all of their customers' accounts.

I use my banks app and transfer money to their PayId using the reference number. The transfer takes a few seconds. When Wise gets the money in their account they resume the transfer and I get an in-app notification. Easy