Live data from Hacker News

Increase: Banking API

increase.com

251–260 of 305 posts

Re: Increase: Banking API

#251

I made an API for a bank... I was a third party and made the API by screen scraping their webUI. I sent their devs a link and initially there were positive messages going back and forth. The API allowed you to see balance, transaction history, and make payments. Before long, the API got quite popular, and lots of people were using it to make lots of payments automatically. You know what makes money laundering super e…

> You know what makes money laundering super easy... a banking API so you can split the million dollars you want to launder into 1 million 1 dollar payments.

Technically known as smurfing, and (as you learned) quickly leads to account bans.

Governments take AML/KYC pretty seriously. Just ask TornadoCash.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#252
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> considering what I now know about how it is put together As someone who doesn't, I'd love to hear more.

Lots of CSV files of transactions sent between banks by sftp servers and processed by big COBOL mainframes. Any part of this process that is modernized still has to emulate the old...

Ah yes the old BAI format which is totally not a CSV file with a bunch of insane rules that differ per bank and are passed around via sftp server that are on the internet.

I'm glad I quit that job. The only problem is when I tell people how the bank actually move money they don't believe me.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#253
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn't crypto have the same problem, with money laundering and other crimes? I don't see how that's the same problem? They are clearly separate, distinct problems. There are obviously both advantages and disadvantages to both crypto and banking. As someone who lives in a country that has been through a lot of bullshit, I highly value the fact that the bank can't just take away my money.

Hackers, on the other hand, can. As can exchanges as repeatedly happened in the last few months. The only difference is that crypto fraud is irreversible, and that the blame will be put on you.

In my understanding most fraud in the fiat world is similarly irreversible, different actors just absorb the costs of the fraud, in the end consumers foot the bill as increased prices.

Fraud is huge industry, the fraud models and attack vectors in the fiat world is different than in the crypto world. In the end wherever there is enough money, there will be fraud as well.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#254
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand how this facilitates money laundering? You send small amounts to a bunch of accounts and then what exactly? What is the source of the funds to launder and how/why is it already in the bank?

I don't think OP knows what he is talking about? You also need "thousands" of accounts, and unless you are opening these remotely, I don't know how you can get this many people to co-operate with your scheme. That also doesn't cover the first part: Laundering the money into the bank. (if the money is already in the banking system, there is nothing to launder). To be honest, I don't think money laundering is real, or…

> To be honest, I don't think money laundering is real, or significant.

Heard it all now time for me to get off this site I think.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open banking is really something that needs to be mandated by regulators. That's what happened in the UK, and now you have a wide choice of financial apps that can access accounts at any bank that implements the standard UK Open Banking APIs: https://www.openbanking.org.uk

I worked with this in the UK - the regulation needs standards with regards to uptime, functionality, data quality and frequent audits to ensure banks are actually compliant. At the moment, besides the neobanks that somewhat know what they’re doing, everyone else’s Open Banking APIs have significant problems that make them unusable for anything serious.

Uptime and performance seems to be monitored pretty closely since 2020:

https://www.openbanking.org.uk/api-performance/

These figures only include the “top 9” UK banks that are required to implement open banking, not smaller banks like Monzo.

I’d argue that open banking is already being used for lots of serious stuff. Credit checking, for example. And of course pretty much any accounting/financial software supports open banking now days.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with this in the UK - the regulation needs standards with regards to uptime, functionality, data quality and frequent audits to ensure banks are actually compliant. At the moment, besides the neobanks that somewhat know what they’re doing, everyone else’s Open Banking APIs have significant problems that make them unusable for anything serious.

Uptime and performance seems to be monitored pretty closely since 2020: https://www.openbanking.org.uk/api-performance/ These figures only include the “top 9” UK banks that are required to implement open banking, not smaller banks like Monzo. I’d argue that open banking is already being used for lots of serious stuff. Credit checking, for example. And of course pretty much any accounting/financial software supports o…

Ironically the smaller banks like Monzo are the only ones that actually do a decent job.

By serious stuff I meant stuff that requires perfect accuracy and integrity - credit checking wouldn't care if you're missing one transaction here or there, or if the timestamps are a little off.

But for accountancy, perfect accuracy is required and OB with legacy banks is far from perfect in that regard - the data quality is bad, you get missing/duplicate transactions, timestamps are off (due to TZ issues). Modern banks are the only ones where the data is any good. For accountancy services, this ends up causing significant support overhead to companies where customers complain their numbers are off and the company can't do anything because the bank sends incorrect data, not to mention engineering overhead where you have to try and clean up the data in-house (the problems are different for each bank, so you have to essentially reverse-engineer how each bank mangles the data and implement bank-specific workarounds).

> Uptime and performance seems to be monitored pretty closely since 2020

Uptime, sure. I too can make a 100% uptime API that returns random data.

When it comes to data quality, there didn't seem to be any authority (in terms of real, practical outcomes - not theoretical powers that never end up being used like the GDPR for example) to complain to - which I find to be a fatal mistake in a situation where banks otherwise have zero incentive to provide a functional & usable OB API (in fact, OB is detrimental to their business as it would allow customers to use a third-party's - often better - service over the bank's own one). Even the OB "gateways" like Plaid, TrueLayer, etc have their hands tied when it comes to this - once the issue is confirmed to be with the bank, the lead time on getting any kind of resolution is often months, during which you have a disgruntled customer breathing down your neck and blaming you for the problem.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about Monzo specifically, but all the major UK banks are required by the UK regulators to provide standard open banking APIs: https://www.openbanking.org.uk In practice this means that any UK financial app that supports open banking should be able to connect to an account at any UK bank that implements open banking.

Open banking is really just an automated way to view your statement. It doesn't allow sending money to someone, creating a new bank account, closing an account, changing your email or postal address, setting up a pension or credit card, or any of the other actions you might want to do at your bank.

> It doesn't allow sending money to someone

Interesting. I use an app called JamDoughnut [1] and I can top up through Google Pay or from my bank. I tried the other day to do it from my bank and it then opened a modal asking me which bank I'm with. I selected Starling and then my Starling app opened asking if it would be OK to share information with Jam Doughnut and send a payment to them.

As this was allowing me to use any bank (not just Starling), I assumed that it must be using Open Banking. Is there some other API out there that would allow them to take payment from any bank? I guess its possible that if I selected a different bank then it would just come up with a message like 'coming soon...'. But it seems surprising that they'd implement for Starling which is one of the smaller banks and not the others.

1. https://jamdoughnut.com/

Re: Increase: Banking API

#258
post #8

Looks cool, but having trouble wrapping my head around a potential use case for this.

I have a real-life scenario that applies to my business: we employee 50+ freelancers ee pay every month. I dread when it comes time to pay them, because I have to log into multiple bank account and manually send each transfer using clunky web UIs. I am just copy-pasting all this data from a spreadsheet where it's already been verified. If I could automate payments to a sizeable portion of the freelancers, it would sa…

I've never used them but Wise might work if the freelancers are all over the world: https://wise.com/gb/business/api

Re: Increase: Banking API

#259
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand how this facilitates money laundering? You send small amounts to a bunch of accounts and then what exactly? What is the source of the funds to launder and how/why is it already in the bank?

I don't think OP knows what he is talking about? You also need "thousands" of accounts, and unless you are opening these remotely, I don't know how you can get this many people to co-operate with your scheme. That also doesn't cover the first part: Laundering the money into the bank. (if the money is already in the banking system, there is nothing to launder). To be honest, I don't think money laundering is real, or…

Money laundering is real, but for some reason everything that I read online (e.g. in news articles or comments) about it is complete nonsense.

E.g. here the nonsense is why money that you already have in a bank account needs to be sent to someone else via 1000s of random small transactions. At best that would add a layer of confusion, but you still have the money laundering problems for the sending and final receiving person.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#260

Thanks @op! Increase employee here: We're early days and not quite ready for open sign-ups yet (sorry, known bug). We'll be more public over the coming weeks and months. We're banking for developers; you can programatically create accounts, cards, and move money. Our users are primarily financial technology companies. We're a small team from Stripe, Robinhood, and Visa building the bank we always wanted. If this soun…

Do you have a jobs page? Or a description what you're looking for and what tech you're using?
Post reply on HN