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Nordigen: API aggregator to European banks

nordigen.com

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: Nordigen: API aggregator to European banks

#31
post #3

I'd really like to have a read-only API that is accessible for personal projects to be able to retrieve my own transaction history. Sadly with PSD2 that is (afaik) impossible, or at least pretty close to impossible. Things like this (nordigen) might "solve" the problem by replacing it with a bigger one: now nordigen (or someone else) has access to all this transaction data and is going to leak it somewhere. I get why…

> now nordigen (or someone else) has access to all this transaction data and is going to leak it somewhere. You must of course be able to trust the 3rd party, Nordigen in this case. But I don't think their operational license even allows storing your financial data - only proxying requests between you and the bank. So only your bank is even allowed to store your financial data. But of course you need to be able to tr…

You are right, trust is the most important thing here. But nordigen does not want my money for their service. Instead they want to sell what looks like APIs for ML over your transaction data. So they at least have a good incentive to use my data for training their model.

ofc, I dont know what they do with it, they may be cool ethical ppl just doing a cool thing and my mistrust might be totaly misplaced.

But I have to trust another entity that proxies my connections. Another link in the chain.

And I dont really want to hit on nordigen here, as I said, I dont know them, I have not read that whole website and havent looked in the details.

For me its more about the generell problem. I find it sad that a service like this seems nessassary.

Re: Nordigen: API aggregator to European banks

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is rally terrible that such a service is actually necessary... PSD2 was a chance to create a standard api for everyone including customers. I still cannot understand how they managed to f it up by limiting access to "trusted companies"

I work at a bank and it's quite simple really. The systems we use at my workplace are so antiquated and wonky that even giving people read access would be a monumental effort. To put it plainly, modernizing these systems takes effort similar in order of magnitude to landing on the moon. Not for any technical reason, but due to the mountains of manual processes and general cruft built up around them. The EU is not dea…

But I can log in to my bank and see a transaction log and it doesn't seem to break anything. How would that break anything?

Re: Nordigen: API aggregator to European banks

#33
post #23

Please stop using multiple accounts to promote your stuff on HN. It's against the rules and we ban accounts and sites that do it. Also, HN users notice obvious cases like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843204 and will flame you if you keep it up. The rules are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . -- For readers: of many past submissions promoting…

Ok, got you. Big thanks for explaining. =)

Re: Nordigen: API aggregator to European banks

#35
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be interested in something similar for open finance?

What does "open finance" mean in this context? I have the same desire as OP to access my own data. I want to build a tool to track my assets. Maybe it's worth building this as open source. Would that be considered "open finance"?

I mean access to your investment portfolio, model portfolios, accounts, your transaction history, trades, pension plans etc.

Re: Nordigen: API aggregator to European banks

#36
post #3

I'd really like to have a read-only API that is accessible for personal projects to be able to retrieve my own transaction history. Sadly with PSD2 that is (afaik) impossible, or at least pretty close to impossible. Things like this (nordigen) might "solve" the problem by replacing it with a bigger one: now nordigen (or someone else) has access to all this transaction data and is going to leak it somewhere. I get why…

> now nordigen (or someone else) has access to all this transaction data and is going to leak it somewhere. You must of course be able to trust the 3rd party, Nordigen in this case. But I don't think their operational license even allows storing your financial data - only proxying requests between you and the bank. So only your bank is even allowed to store your financial data. But of course you need to be able to tr…

Read this comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28035602

Nordigen does actually reuse, store and sell your financial data in "anonymized" form. That's rather concerning.

Re: Nordigen: API aggregator to European banks

#37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now nordigen (or someone else) has access to all this transaction data and is going to leak it somewhere. You must of course be able to trust the 3rd party, Nordigen in this case. But I don't think their operational license even allows storing your financial data - only proxying requests between you and the bank. So only your bank is even allowed to store your financial data. But of course you need to be able to tr…

You are right, trust is the most important thing here. But nordigen does not want my money for their service. Instead they want to sell what looks like APIs for ML over your transaction data. So they at least have a good incentive to use my data for training their model. ofc, I dont know what they do with it, they may be cool ethical ppl just doing a cool thing and my mistrust might be totaly misplaced. But I have to…

They might be cool ethical people that might be bought up by Facebook or Google at some point.
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