Awesome pain point yall fixing here. Do any of these firms provide actual, document APIs intended for external use?
I'd happily drop my current brokerages and switch to a consumer-friendly brokerage that supported this.
Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
71–80 of 97 posts
Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Tha…
Either force through regulations or gotta make it in their interests to support a public API. Financially or else. I don't think they'll do just for the sake of it.
Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
#73Congrats on the launch! I'm the CEO and co-founder of https://teller.io that uses private mobile banking APIs to provide access to bank accounts too, and you're right it's the way to go. We don't think regulation or OAuth based APIs will ever yield an improvement on this approach (explained why here - https://blog.teller.io/2021/06/21/our-mission.html)
You're going to quickly find out that these API endpoints are commonly very well protected as build out your coverage however!
Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
#74Earlier 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…
I think "direct integrations" as a euphemism from "using reverse-engineered private APIs in violation of their terms" is dishonest.
It's not as long as they expressly state there is no relationship or endorsement with the brokerages where there isn't one.
Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
#75Awesome pain point yall fixing here. Do any of these firms provide actual, document APIs intended for external use? I'd happily drop my current brokerages and switch to a consumer-friendly brokerage that supported this.
TD Ameritrade is the biggest brokerage we deal with that has a documented public API intended for external use, but the documentation isn't entirely accurate and the rate limits on some endpoints are fairly restrictive by default (120 req/min, which is shared across all accounts connected to an OAuth app - we had to have this bumped by several orders of magnitude for our use case). TDA has been great to work with overall though; getting in contact with the right people there was the main challenge.
Alpaca provides a great API for equities (and now crypto) trading, but the instrument and order strategy support is limited compared to the likes of TD/IBKR. They've been API-first from the start, so their API is more modern and pretty painless to work with.
Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
#76I'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...
Interactive Brokers lets you create a whitelabelled sub-brokerage on their platform, and their APIs are sufficient to build this.
Perhaps Realize is using something like that on the back end.
Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
#77This looks great! Going to talk this over with my co-founder to include in our list (currently have direct TD Ameritrade interaction) Feature wishlist: - Include Interactive Brokers - Support Options in trades
Thanks! Feel free to reach out to me at sean@realizefi.com if you & your co-founder want to talk about your use case.
Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
#78Congrats on the launch! I'm the CEO and co-founder of https://teller.io that uses private mobile banking APIs to provide access to bank accounts too, and you're right it's the way to go. We don't think regulation or OAuth based APIs will ever yield an improvement on this approach (explained why here - https://blog.teller.io/2021/06/21/our-mission.html ) You're going to quickly find out that these API endpoints are co…
Thanks! Teller looks really cool - there's definitely a real market for what you're doing, though I don't envy your position having to deal with the big banks given how misaligned incentives are in the retail banking industry.
You made some good points about direct integrations - some of the public APIs we deal with are totally separate from the brokerages' internal APIs and that's made painfully apparent during an integration. It has taken us months to get access to prod keys at some of the largest institutions and many of them seek to impose pretty onerous conditions on our customers and their users once we get through their compliance processes. Still, we've seen brokerages becoming more receptive to the idea of opening up their APIs, so we're optimistic that we can form partnerships with them and nudge them toward building better public APIs.
Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
#79Congrats on the launch! I'm the CEO and co-founder of https://teller.io that uses private mobile banking APIs to provide access to bank accounts too, and you're right it's the way to go. We don't think regulation or OAuth based APIs will ever yield an improvement on this approach (explained why here - https://blog.teller.io/2021/06/21/our-mission.html ) You're going to quickly find out that these API endpoints are co…
Thanks for commenting - funny enough I was actually telling our team about Teller the other day - it's awesome how much you've been able to achieve. Would be great to stay in touch!
Re: Launch HN: Realize (YC W22) – Integrate brokerage accounts into your site or app
#80Congrats on the launch! I'm the CEO and co-founder of https://teller.io that uses private mobile banking APIs to provide access to bank accounts too, and you're right it's the way to go. We don't think regulation or OAuth based APIs will ever yield an improvement on this approach (explained why here - https://blog.teller.io/2021/06/21/our-mission.html ) You're going to quickly find out that these API endpoints are co…
Thanks! Teller looks really cool - there's definitely a real market for what you're doing, though I don't envy your position having to deal with the big banks given how misaligned incentives are in the retail banking industry. You made some good points about direct integrations - some of the public APIs we deal with are totally separate from the brokerages' internal APIs and that's made painfully apparent during an i…
Yea, I'd agree that the misaligned incentives problem isn't nearly as bad for you guys as it in with retail banking. Good luck, rooting for you!