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Teller – API for your bank account

blog.teller.io

261–270 of 282 posts

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#261

Hey all - co-founder of Plaid[0]. Congrats to Steve - great to see some innovation across the pond! There were a bunch of questions about Plaid and the difference. The obvious one is that Teller is UK only and supports the top couple banks, Plaid is US only and supports thousands of financial institutions. If you need both UK and US coverage - since we both have pretty developer friendly APIs - it seems like a nice c…

>Steve/Teller have also taken a bit of an antagonistic approach and has not worked with the banks - time will see if this proves successful

Citation needed. Clearly you have a competing product. I'm surprised to see you using HN to throw shade at a competitor without context.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mint is probably the one you don't have to worry about. The service that stores credentials and scrapes bank sites is the same one that powers TurboTax and QuickBooks. Intuit spends a lot of money keeping that service secure and they're well aware of how catastrophic a breech would be. In short, that service is run out of private datacenters, not publicly available. You'd have to compromise not just Mint/TurboTax/Qui…

I don't know, if the general level of bug-ridden-ness of their products is any indication, I wouldn't put much stock in their security. There are glaring bugs in Quickbooks for example that persist year after year, having been reported repeatedly, even as they continue to release a new version every single year with various visual tweaks and seemingly not much else.

The level of bugs and slowness in Quicken is mind bending. I've been using Quicken since it ran in MS-DOS and I've watched it get slower and buggier every year.

My latest version (Quicken 2016) literally takes seconds to tab between fields and often does not keep a correct tally balance until I close the check register view. I only have a year of data in it (I thought the slowness might have been due to importing my old data so I restarted fresh).

Since I've been getting bombarded with upgrade ads that I can't seem to disable each time I start Quicken I'm thinking of moving to another app like Moneydance. It feel like an end of an era.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

slight tangent - anybody have a contact at SVB? We are building a better front-end for any bank on top of Teller (or any other banking API) - http://bixtr.com . I have some friends who use SVB but they all agree on needing a a much better front-end experience - so would like to help them.

Hey Jouni, meeting them today. Will mention you and connect.

Thanks Stevie! You rock.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#264
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never? You need legally available reverse engineering without dmca-hammer to be applied plus PSD2 directive coming soon forcing banks to open. Those are EU things.

yodlee, mint, quicken, come on. I've had bank transaction information for last 20 years

Mint is readonly. PSD2 and reverse engineered api is not. Also Mint exposes you to the very threat mentioned in top comment, while PSD2 protects you here.

So how about No?

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, if the general level of bug-ridden-ness of their products is any indication, I wouldn't put much stock in their security. There are glaring bugs in Quickbooks for example that persist year after year, having been reported repeatedly, even as they continue to release a new version every single year with various visual tweaks and seemingly not much else.

QuickBooks, even the online version, are decades old and have major issues that prevent the teams from getting much done. They took a year to do clean-up and basically didn't introduce any new features. Not much got done just due to the complexity of changing anything without causing problems. FICDS, on the other hand, was spun up more recently and is in much better shape. I wouldn't look at an application like QBO a…

what is FICDS? What does it mean "quickbooks online is decades old"?

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#266
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FinTS (formerly known as HBCI) is horrible and serves as a great example of how not to design a API. The non-machine-readable german-language-only API specification consist of >800 pages spread across various PDFs[1] full of gibberish. There are no official client libraries, no minimal examples, different banks only support certain versions etc. etc. etc. [1] https://www.hbci-zka.de/dokumente/spezifikation_deutsch/fi…

German isn't "gibberish" to some of us, so I would not describe it that way. It's a German banking API after all. A functional API that is being used is better than no API at all.

Nobody said it was. They said it was a german-only specification that was full of gibberish, you could just as easily have an english-only specification that was full of gibberish (as most are to be honest).

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#267

Early on at Token, we looked Teller as a possible solution to getting to market quickly. We found two things: 1) the lawyers told us to stay clear (huge greyzone) and 2) the banks themselves didn't want to engage with us using teller even if it sped up development time. We even brought stevie in talk to our lawyers to make his case. He failed to convince them. Finally, we inquired about the price. Stevie was elusive…

Steve, I'm really surprised. > the lawyers told us to stay clear (huge greyzone) I remember going in to speak with your lawyers, convincing them, you emailing me the same day telling me as much and still wanting to do a deal. > Stevie was elusive on pricing. I finally asked, "Look, if we paid you $1M, how many banks could we get?" He said one. If you then thought I was going to give you, a competitor, my core IP for…

It seems you boys can settle your dispute the old fashioned way: by providing support for your claims.

I remember going in to speak with your lawyers, convincing them, you emailing me the same day telling me as much and still wanting to do a deal. At least one of you should have these emails.

If you then thought I was going to give you, a competitor, my core IP for 1 million dollars a year, while you used it with your series A money to capture the market, well then you must be out of your damn mind. You would have been paid $1m/year to provide a service. You wouldn't have given up ownership of your company, or taken a risk on stock valuations. $1m cash. Each year. Actual cash. For a startup of 1. If you don't think that's good money right out of the gate, you have serious judgment issues (and this is also reflected in your top-floating comment re security).

Nobody has heard of Token, you have zero technology and zero bank integrations. This was the first time I've heard of Teller...If Token claims they have bank customers that they're providing integration for, it's an easy matter for them to prove it; they only need to publicize one bank client to refute your claims. On the other hand, you come across as very petulant when you say nobody has heard of Token and that they have zero technology or bank integrations since that's an easily disprovable claim.

FinTech and financial services place a lot of value in judgment, since their industry is defined by risk. Right now, you're not showing much good judgment, and if you keep up like this, you have no chance in this space because you're demonstrating in many ways that you're a bad risk for them to take.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#268
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your terms: "We are not liable for any loss or damage that may result from your use of our services. This includes any direct, indirect, or consequential losses; any loss or damage caused by tort, including negligence, breach of contract or otherwise." You don't get taken seriously in the financial space with terms like that. You need to accept responsibility for errors and carry errors and omissions insurance. Compa…

Thanks for your feedback. We developed TAuth to provide attribution and non-repudiation for exactly this kind of situation. I personally take security very seriously such that launching our product has taken longer because designing and implementing a system worthy of performing financial transactions on behalf of others is a serious undertaking. Our terms are comparable to the incumbent "screen-scrapers" in the mark…

The problem isn't what an attacker can do with Teller credentials. The problem is what an attacker can do with the banking credentials you ask users for. The risk profile is similar here to a breach in an online password manager -- if you used an online password manager to store your banking credentials, are you perfectly comfortable with an attacker gaining access to your credentials since the password manager implements no banking functionality?

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose you could have a point about the fact that (good) accountants know the work-arounds. And many of the bugs are annoyances and UI things rather than critical stuff. There are some that will really bite you (meaning, result in incorrect accounting) if you're not familiar with them. For example, the home currency adjustment in the multi-currency mode skips accounts with a current balance of 0 in foreign currenc…

Heh...you're talking QBD. That's the true dysfunction of Intuit. It's the product Intuit doesn't want you to use. They want customers to transition to QBO and only "maintain" Desktop because many customers refuse to "upgrade" to Online. I never met a single employee who was currently working on QBD. A product that accounts for more that 1/4 of their revenue and they had literally no engineers participating in company…

Yeah, I don't love the idea of trying to run accounting software in a browser; doesn't seem like it could possibly have the performance of a desktop app. Also, last I checked, QBD includes features I use that QBO doesn't. I can't recall what they were though, so that may no longer be the case.

So, does this mean QBD is basically the living dead, and inevitably I'll have to find an alternative? It looks like everyone's doing online these days.. :/

Edit: Yeah, looks like it doesn't have inventory tracking. Conflicting reports on multi-currency support too.

Looks like Xero might be a viable option though.

Re: Teller – API for your bank account

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh...you're talking QBD. That's the true dysfunction of Intuit. It's the product Intuit doesn't want you to use. They want customers to transition to QBO and only "maintain" Desktop because many customers refuse to "upgrade" to Online. I never met a single employee who was currently working on QBD. A product that accounts for more that 1/4 of their revenue and they had literally no engineers participating in company…

Yeah, I don't love the idea of trying to run accounting software in a browser; doesn't seem like it could possibly have the performance of a desktop app. Also, last I checked, QBD includes features I use that QBO doesn't. I can't recall what they were though, so that may no longer be the case. So, does this mean QBD is basically the living dead, and inevitably I'll have to find an alternative? It looks like everyone'…

> So, does this mean QBD is basically the living dead

That was the impression I got when I was there. They're putting a ton of effort into getting people to migrate. But there's still a ton of die-hards that won't and they were continually having to push back their sunsetting plans. I've been gone more than a year now, so I can't say what the current situation is.

It sounds like you're a lot more familiar with the long-tail features of QuickBooks, so I may be recommending something that's missing a lot of what you need, but my favorite competitor product was Wave. They seemed to be the only one that was actually trying to make an intuitive product that wasn't unpleasant to use. It's online though and I don't really know much about the desktop alternatives, so if you're set on running on-prem software, it won't work for you. The accounting stuff is free, though, if you want to play with it.

But Xero is also online only, right? I was pretty negative on them, considering they basically started from scratch in an era where the result should have been much better than Quickbooks considering it didn't have all the baggage that Quickbooks has to deal with. And yet they came up with something that's arguably just as frustrating to use.

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