> Extend your account by building new features and integrating with other services using our securely hosted JavaScript code. Your current balance is: NaN
which is a 'number' LOL
Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
321–330 of 427 posts
Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to collapse all of my recurring payments into a monthly report, that I can review and authorize. This is exactly the thing banks are suited to handle. It would also be cool if a bank could abstract bill payments for me, where they present the debit, and show the time window to pay it, and let me select what business day to process it on. Actually, all of these services exist in one form or another. If you ha…
> I'd love to collapse all of my recurring payments into a monthly report, that I can review and authorize. Yes, even just a list of the recurring payments (that is updated in realtime and that you can centrally discontinue) should be available to the banking consumer -- and it should be the responsibility of the banking entity to provide this feature. The do not, because the financial sector makes its revenue from p…
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Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't be so confident that the right thing happens always. I had a friend that was told he could delay a payment and they tricked him into paying late and they sold his home already... after many legal battles he eventually won but the bank said that they already sold the home so that we're in a losing situation either way. They picked the lesser of two evils. Form what i understand it was because two branches of the…
That sounds like intentional malice rather than an accident. If you can't bounce a cheque safely, you don't really have a bank; you have a loan shark.
Was a legit large bank. They did lose the case, and forked over for it but still... Had nothing to do with who was right or wrong and made shit very complicated. NEVER go 3 months without paying your payments no matter what anyone says the risks are way too high. Oh and always have a friend that is a lawyer ;)
Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
#324What problem does this attempt to solve? Their slack example doesn't seem particularly pressing.
The kind of thing that I would like to be able to do is have a bunch of different virtual accounts that I can use for various different things. Pretty much the envelope spending system, but with cards. I'd be able to take in paychecks and other income into a primary account, pay bills and distribute the rest into various accounts (for example, Eating out, Entertainment, Books, Learning, etc) according to some budget.…
simple.com kinda-sorta had this idea, but without the denying transactions bit (and I kinda want the ability to set a goal that just gets money added to it every month, indefinitely, but that's not a feature :( )
Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
5. Due to a bug in _your_ code, accidentally have your mortgage payments bounce because of lack of funds, and get evicted from your home. With great power comes great responsibility. The number of times you say 'perhaps', 'unless', 'so if', or 'could' is so high that you would have to thoroughly review your code before trusting it.
Well, sure. But lots of people write code that involves doing things money for a living. (I do.) ...If someone wants to say, "well sure, but that's not my money", I hope they'll also name the services or apps they work for, so I can avoid those.
They generally have a team behind them, rather than an individual.
Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
5. Due to a bug in _your_ code, accidentally have your mortgage payments bounce because of lack of funds, and get evicted from your home. With great power comes great responsibility. The number of times you say 'perhaps', 'unless', 'so if', or 'could' is so high that you would have to thoroughly review your code before trusting it.
Well, sure. But lots of people write code that involves doing things money for a living. (I do.) ...If someone wants to say, "well sure, but that's not my money", I hope they'll also name the services or apps they work for, so I can avoid those.
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Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
"ahead of the West" Ahem, ahead of the US, really. Canada and the EU can be cashless already, with chip cards and direct bank withdrawal at the POS a reality for 99.99% of merchants.
China is cashless. Stores don't accept your cash much. And you have to show a government id to buy anything. And they track you. But it gets worse than that. If the government wants to punish you, they can just cut you off. Can't buy food, can't pay rent. Oh you think your friends can help you? China has that covered too, with its shiny new credit system. Being associated with - let alone helping - people cut off fro…
That's not accurate. I was just in Chengdu and Shenzhen last month and paid almost exclusively in cash everywhere I went. In fact for smaller vendors and street food, cash is the only option. Many vendors also accept WeChat payments (which seems to be the most common form of payment, at least for casual to mid-range transactions by people in my peer group), and UnionPay network credit cards are also widely accepted. Western credit/debit cards tend to work only at more upscale/modern/larger vendors. From what I've seen of Chinese commerce in various cities, I would be very very surprised if China went anywhere near cashless anytime soon. Cash seems to be a bigger part of the culture there than in the USA.
You do have to show government ID to get a cell phone or purchase long-distance train tickets. Also checking into a higher end hotel. And since using public Wi-Fi requires you to authenticate with your Chinese phone number, that's also effectively linked to your ID. There are many aspects of Chinese society that are easily trackable by the government, but commerce does not seem to be one of them, at least from what I've seen.
Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't used BofA for a while, but in general the problems I have with these features are 1) inaccurate classification and no way to fix it 2) exported data does not include all of this, so if I move banks or want to do analysis I'm sol ymmv, of course
Yeah definitely. The classifications of transactions is generally poor. Even with Simple, which is very generous in allowing you to (re)assign arbitrary tags on the fly and provide nice data metrics, I'd still like to generate different graphs than they choose to present. The ability to aggregate the data from all my accounts would be amazing...
So export the json from simple and build your own graphs, then.
Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
#329I'd like to have something like this for Germany. I am willing to pay 10€/month for a simple API access to my bank account. I need neither hosted code nor push. Just give me remote access for my scripts. Probably I'm asking for the impossible because of the heavy regulation in Germany but just wanted to put it out there.
You can simulate a browser and act as if you're a normal, browser using customer. Encapsulate it and you've got an "API"; though it'll be a bit painful as a lot of banks' web backends are fucked up and you'll need to keep up to date with their changes, but still. I did it for my French bank account at one point (get balance + submit transfer).
Apparently, some used this technique for actual commercial services, which was partly motivation (they called it "screen scraping") for the European Commission's recent directive to require banks to allow authorized third-party access to customer account data.
https://paymentscompliance.com/premium-content/insights_anal...
Re: Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
#330When can I have direct control of recurring payments? I want to be able to "push" money instead of having it "pulled" from my account. This is a totally reasonable feature. If a merchant wants assurance that they will be paid, they should charge a deposit. The closest I've had is Entropay, but I don't really trust them for large payments. Recurring payments are so abused, I can't count how many times I have been misl…
I wish I could just have the ability to create virtual credit card numbers. I would be able to fill it with a certain balance, set up recurring balance refills, change the expiration date, keep a merchant whitelist, and cancel the number at any time. This gives me the opportunity to make sure that even if my card number was stolen or abused, the charge won't go through. If I sign up for a free trial or a service I on…
In Portugal we can do just that with MBNet :D
https://www.mbnet.pt/