Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

realizefi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#21

Post by svnt »

timothygoltser wrote: post #16
ceejayoz wrote: post #12

> We take an entirely different approach by building direct integrations... > Private APIs need to be reverse engineered and are liable to change at any moment, so we had to develop systems to catch breaking changes and are always on alert to address them. Isn't this still, essentially, screen-scraping? Reverse-engineering private APIs (presumably from their mobile apps, I'd imagine) and doing the abuse/block dance w…

While we try to form relationships with all of the brokerages we integrate with (including the ones we reverse engineer), we do still have to do the abuse/block dance with their protective systems occasionally. We've found that cutting out headless browsers has made it much easier to do this, for two main reasons: 1) Some brokerages have fairly sophisticated anti-screen-scraping protections, but their private APIs ar…

> 2) It's generally more difficult to create protective systems for private APIs, since there are fewer ways to fingerprint non-browser clients.

There are? I think what you meant to say is “they haven’t worried much about key distribution, yet”?

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#22

Post by timothygoltser »

captn3m0 wrote: post #14
ceejayoz wrote: post #12

> We take an entirely different approach by building direct integrations... > Private APIs need to be reverse engineered and are liable to change at any moment, so we had to develop systems to catch breaking changes and are always on alert to address them. Isn't this still, essentially, screen-scraping? Reverse-engineering private APIs (presumably from their mobile apps, I'd imagine) and doing the abuse/block dance w…

Who is liable if the user's brokerage account gets blocked?

It depends on the nature of the activity that got the account blocked - we place limits on the types of legitimate account activity that are likely to get a user blocked (sending too many orders too quickly, sending orders that could be batched as a flood of single orders, etc.), but for fraudulent or otherwise illegal activity, that liability is on the user.

When starting a new integration, we schedule a meeting with the brokerage in question (if they'll have us) to discuss issues of this nature. The response we've gotten so far has been "as long as you don't enable illegal activity or put unnecessary load on our service, we won't take action against you or your users," though we're sure some brokerages will have a more aggressive stance on this in the future. We aim to work in partnership with them and advocate for the ability to integrate in this way, and we encourage the brokerages that gives us an audience to build public APIs.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#23

Post by wisdomtt »

rmbyrro wrote: post #18
ceejayoz wrote: post #12

> We take an entirely different approach by building direct integrations... > Private APIs need to be reverse engineered and are liable to change at any moment, so we had to develop systems to catch breaking changes and are always on alert to address them. Isn't this still, essentially, screen-scraping? Reverse-engineering private APIs (presumably from their mobile apps, I'd imagine) and doing the abuse/block dance w…

This sounds like backwards to how this industry should be evolving...

We agree, we would MUCH rather be implementing sanctioned integrations and we will go the sanctioned route whenever possible. We're trying to establish relations with these big institutions to push them towards sanctioned access and also get feedback on what would be best practices for integrating with them. Our bet is that the industry in the long-run will be moving towards enabling sanctioned access delegation. That being said, at the end of the day users want to export data from their brokerage apps and they want the means of exporting this data to be stable.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#25

Post by toomuchtodo »

bradhilton wrote: post #24

I'd LOVE to use this, but seems legally dubious. I'd love to see some written approval from Robinhood and Webull. Seems like an obvious solution, there must be a reason it hasn't been done before...

Financial services firms aren’t gonna sign off on this due to liability and cyber risk (fully permissioned financial identity auth token loss could equal substantial asset theft), and they won’t provide it themselves unless required to by statute or regulatory rulings. It’s possible there’s eventually enough uptake for Realize to convince those they integrate with to provide endpoints with read only scoping. Fidelity in particular seems to be running quick from a tech transformation perspective, making them more open about sanctioned integrations.

Europe got this right with PSD2, the US will catch up eventually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#26

Post by timothygoltser »

svnt wrote: post #21
timothygoltser wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we try to form relationships with all of the brokerages we integrate with (including the ones we reverse engineer), we do still have to do the abuse/block dance with their protective systems occasionally. We've found that cutting out headless browsers has made it much easier to do this, for two main reasons: 1) Some brokerages have fairly sophisticated anti-screen-scraping protections, but their private APIs ar…

> 2) It's generally more difficult to create protective systems for private APIs, since there are fewer ways to fingerprint non-browser clients. There are? I think what you meant to say is “they haven’t worried much about key distribution, yet”?

In a sense. There are certainly protections they can implement against non-browser clients; what I meant is that it would be more difficult for them to implement the usual sorts of defenses you see against screen scraping since the surface area available for fingerprinting is much smaller.

We haven't seen brokerages expend significant effort on this, and the industry seems to be moving in the direction of providing more open access to APIs, so we're (cautiously) optimistic that we will be able to convince them to provide more sanctioned integration paths such that we don't need to continue playing cat-mouse with them.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#27

Post by seandoh »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #25
bradhilton wrote: post #24

I'd LOVE to use this, but seems legally dubious. I'd love to see some written approval from Robinhood and Webull. Seems like an obvious solution, there must be a reason it hasn't been done before...

Financial services firms aren’t gonna sign off on this due to liability and cyber risk (fully permissioned financial identity auth token loss could equal substantial asset theft), and they won’t provide it themselves unless required to by statute or regulatory rulings. It’s possible there’s eventually enough uptake for Realize to convince those they integrate with to provide endpoints with read only scoping. Fidelity…

That's how we are thinking about this as well.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#29

Post by seandoh »

8lueberry wrote: post #28

Congrats on the launch :) I built an integration for 2 brokers and it was such a pain. Plaid didn't work and TradeIt just disappeared. Will definitely take a look.

Thanks! Let us know if you have any questions / want to discuss anything while you're testing it out.

Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app

#30

Post by melony »

timothygoltser wrote: post #6
melony wrote: post #2

Reminds me of https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190403005265/en/Tra... How does your pricing work?

We see ourselves as somewhat of a spiritual successor to TradeIt - we're trying to provide high-quality access to brokerage accounts so that people can build better investing apps on top of existing brokerages. In terms of pricing: we charge a $300/mo base fee for your first 300 linked brokerage accounts, then $1/linked account/mo thereafter, with reduced pricing at various levels of scale.

Do you plan to offer a more developer friendly pricing?
Post reply on HN