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Increase: Banking API

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Re: Increase: Banking API

#281

Post by Reason077 »

arohner wrote: post #279
iLoveOncall wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of EU-based neobanks are NOT real banks. 90% of them are just a frontend. Even Revolut that you cite was just a frontend until January 2021 where it became a bank, but just in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolut#History

Revolut is not a bank in the UK

Revolut has applied for a UK banking license (PRA and FCA authorisations), but they seem to be encountering difficulties and delays in having them granted.

Revolut's links to Russia are, perhaps, not helping with that.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#282

Post by pydry »

taberiand wrote: post #109
redox99 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to be "that guy", but this is why I hate banks and like crypto. Both the fact that crypto is obviously trivial to automate, and that banks can unilaterally ban you and steal your money.

Crypto of course being famously free of fraud and theft, with no tendency at all towards coalescing control around a small, centralised set of decision makers.

It's actually all an elaborate conspiracy to prove that banking regs had a purpose after all.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#283

Post by Reason077 »

sofixa wrote: post #270
iLoveOncall wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of EU-based neobanks are NOT real banks. 90% of them are just a frontend. Even Revolut that you cite was just a frontend until January 2021 where it became a bank, but just in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolut#History

> In December 2018, Revolut secured a Challenger bank licence from the European Central Bank, facilitated by the Bank of Lithuania, authorising it to accept deposits and offer consumer credits, but not to provide investment services. At the same time, an Electronic Money Institution licence was also issued by the Bank of Lithuania. What are you talking about? Revolut is a real bank, same as Monzo, N26, Aumax (part of…

Revolut does not have a bank license in the UK. They've applied, but it has not yet been granted.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#284

Post by lakomen »

German banking is in such a bad place right now, because of, mildly put, overregulation by the EU. In reality it's them trying to create arbitrary markets. You can no longer use the old API that worked well, where you login once and can do whatever. Every single action now has to be authorized with an OTP ( tan ). If you're building a shop and would like to automate payments, incoming or outgoing, you can't do that anymore without a) exposing your account data to 3rd parties and b) for free.

This is one of the reasons why I say that the EU is corrupt.

Ok so I tried to play their game, and asked the BAFIN what I had to do in order to become such an entity. I wrote 5 mails back and forth over the course of 3 months, not a single response had clear, concrete instructions on who to wrote to and what to send them.

I had to read some hard to find article about PSD2 to know that I have to pay the Bundesdruckerei for a certificate, x509, every year, in order to be able to query the XS2A api.

It's dirty, exclusive and corrupt and no one is doing anything about it.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#285

Post by KptMarchewa »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #271
quickthrower2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The api seems to let you create new accounts fairly easily. Seems odd to me as the API provider is the bank. Based on KYC I presume they think they are all splits of the same account holder? I learned the other day that the name on account means shit, because scammers often give $account_details + $catfish_name and receive the money to $bank_details + $real_name. I don’t see how splitting to 1000 transactions and sen…

> I don’t see how splitting to 1000 transactions and sending money to yourself helps with money laundering or undercover money sending Banks rely on a fixed set of rules to trigger an investigation for money laundering. One of these rules is the value of the transaction. I worked in retail whilst at Uni in the UK and we often had people who had lot's of money in their accounts unable to make large purchases due to th…

>Banks rely on a fixed set of rules to trigger an investigation for money laundering.

Mostly, yes. But there are hundreds of those rules.

>One of these rules is the value of the transaction.

That happened, but I doubt that is the most important rule now. From what I've seen in my experience way bigger focus total value of transactions compared to various metrics.

Very large number of transactions on personal accounts is also one of those rules.

>Their payment would be automatically blocked and you would get a phone number they had to call to be able to make the payment. It was for example when buying a £5000 kitchen (I worked in the equivalent of home depot in the UK). If they could have split that transaction down to say 10 payments of £500 it wouldn't have triggered anything on the bank side.

That sounds like fraud, not money laundering rule.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#286

Post by lisper »

kangaroozach wrote: post #272
lisper wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, you got off easy. I spent six years of actual work learning this lesson the hard way back in 2006-2012. In retrospect, I should have paid a lot more attention when Patric Collison told me he was spending his days reading up banking regulations. Eh, too boring, I thought, what could possibly be in there that a little code couldn't paper over? That mistake cost me the opportunity to be an early hire at Stripe.

Examples of what you discovered? This isn’t clicking for me…

The biggest surprise was how hard it was to find anyone who actually understood how the system works. I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of people have never met an actual banker. All of the people you interact with at your local bank branch are either sales people or technicians. They know about as much about banking as the guy working the Jiffy Lube knows about cars.

Not only that, but getting a meeting with someone who understands how banking actually works under the hood is nearly impossible. In fact, even finding such a person is nearly impossible. Not only do the front-line people in banks not understand how their industry works, they don't even know who does understand.

There is also a huge disconnect between banking and IT. I once had half a million dollars go missing for two weeks because of a wire transfer snafu. No one could figure out where the money was. The only reason it was recovered is that the person to whom the money had been wired incorrectly noticed and sent it back.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#287

Post by toomuchtodo »

chocolatkey wrote: post #206
toomuchtodo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is TransferWise an option?

I'm considering it for foreign payments, but what I'm looking for is really a good API for ACH, Wire etc. because different freelancers want to use different payment methods. Honestly if Mercury (which we have an account with) would just let us do International Wires through their API it would already make life easier, but for whatever reason they only condone ACH transfers through their API (even though the web UI u…

All fair points! My apologies I could not be more helpful.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#288

Post by lisper »

londons_explore wrote: post #243
icy wrote: 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...

Yep, a shocking amount of ad-hoc processes and standards held over from the 70s and earlier. Also, most surprising to me, very few people in the industry actually understand how it works. Most people have never met an actual banker. The people in your local bank branch are sales people and technicians. It is nearly impossible even to find someone who really knows what is going on under the hood, let alone get a meeting with them. And there is no documentation, no primer you can read to bring you up to speed the way you can learn about emacs or Javascript. It's all a good-old-boy network, and even finding an actual member of the club to talk to is nearly impossible.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#289

Post by rattray »

fatneckbeardz wrote: post #230
chadash wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

curl -X "POST" \ --url https://api.increase.com/check_transfers \ -H "Authorization: Bearer ${INCREASE_API_KEY}" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d $'{ "account_id": "account0", "address_line1": "33 Liberty Street", "address_city": "New York", "address_state": "NY", "address_zip": "10045", "amount": 1000, "message": "Check payment", "recipient_name": "Ian Crease" }' Well it would certainly be nice if I can se…

you do not have an address line 2 you do not have an address line 3 the amount data type is not clear (is that an integer representing pennies, is it a floating point? shouldnt be using floating point for banking) recipient name is not broken up into first name, middle name, last name. are you users going to be putting "last, first" as well as "first last"? if you sent that from the command line, then your banking in…

They have good docs, and return good error messages.

Bash history can be cleared about as easily as other places people routinely put similar information.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#290

Post by Gys »

lakomen wrote: post #284

German banking is in such a bad place right now, because of, mildly put, overregulation by the EU. In reality it's them trying to create arbitrary markets. You can no longer use the old API that worked well, where you login once and can do whatever. Every single action now has to be authorized with an OTP ( tan ). If you're building a shop and would like to automate payments, incoming or outgoing, you can't do that a…

Its not the EU. Banks just do not want do deal with individuals using their API. That is not their business. Support is too expensive.
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