Because of this we created Bankscrap[1], a Ruby gem to access multiple banks. We basically find the APIs that the Banks are using for their mobile apps and expose them through a common Ruby library with an unified data model.<p>Each bank has an open source adapter (this is different to Teller) and we encourage the community to help us building more adapters. So far we got adapters for 4 major banks in Spain, and 3 more are a work in progress.<p>Whether PSD2 is going to happen or not, we believe public APIs for banks will happen (even if banks don't like it).<p>IMHO banks arte not scared because of security concerns: they all have APIs in production already, they are just not documented. Their main concerns is basically how APIs used by third party services could affect their businesses.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/bankscrap/bankscrap" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bankscrap/bankscrap</a>
I used to work in banking security and I can understand the bank's concerns. If they allow a 3rd party access to customer data and that customer data is subsequently leaked and used for fraud, who's liable?<p>If a law could codify an acceptable answer to that problem, I think a lot of the security/regulatory problems could go away. Banks might still try to stop the process for competitive reasons, but they might not be able to lean on the crutch of "security" to do so.<p>In the UK this problem isn't new, there were aggregator services 15 years ago that screen-scraped banking data to provide customers with a consolidated view of their finances and they required customer's to provide their credentials for them to do that. Banks understandably weren't too pleased about the idea of 3rd parties having those credentials.
It seems to me that many of the banks' concerns are legit.<p>I personally am not particularly keen on yet another API being made available to a bunch of rapacious VC-funded startups that facilitates my intimately personal financial info being spread around. Personally I bank with metro bank in the UK, they're new, competitive, and frankly pretty darn good, all for free. Do I need even more "financial services" thrown at me when there are apparently zillions of bricks and mortar operators already offering me everything from credit cards, subprime, insurance, car finance, re-mortgaging, yada yada yada yada ad infinitum?<p>I would argue that in this case, the banks' and my interests are somewhat aligned. They're protecting my privacy! How many profit seeking entities on the internet can say that?<p>I get it that fintech would dearly love to get its hands on people's money, but is there actual demand from said people for even more financial services? Or does this post simply amount to self-interested regulatory lobbying for a zero sum transfer of economic rents to the fintech space. Because you just know that if these APIs come about, fintech will find all sorts of dubiously "persuasive" ways to get people to allow access, possibly against their own interests.
FYI, Teller [<a href="https://teller.io/" rel="nofollow">https://teller.io/</a>] in the UK, does what every developer would dream of.
Just throwing this in here: <a href="https://github.com/OpenBankProject/OBP-API" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OpenBankProject/OBP-API</a>
security isn't the only problem. banks do not want the users to be fully informed. if you overdraw your account, they make more money.<p>personally, i'd love to write my own open source clients you can verify and compile yourself that provide better information and heuristics - but that'd hurt the banks.<p>there are several kinds of of users: those who make the bank money (the uninformed that do not care much) and those who are actually interested in their statements. the latter are loss leaders. for consumer banks, the latter seem to be in the majority.<p>an app that informs you with the best intention (warning: if you continue your spending for the rest of the month like you did this week, you'll pay a lot extra!) would shift the balance even more.
> Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) with a tokenized or alternative authentication method [...] can be inconsistent among financial institutions<p>That sounds like a made up argument. How is structured data less consistent than the scraping that is currently happening?
A more realistic argument is that banking systems are old and outdated, the cost of upgrade is enormous and no banks wants to be first.<p>Worse, some banks actually have standard APIs (e.g. OFX) than are used by commercial accounting softwares (e.g. mint, quicken) but the banks (e.g. Chase) charges a monthly fee to enable it.
Since I'm doing API gateways.<p>I can tell banks plan or want to offer PSD2 services.<p>Either by a third party or offering them on there own.<p>What you might get though is a terible ugly interface to the inner part of the bank.<p>I also just read the newest version of the PSD2 proposal. There is (sadly or luckily) still no plan for further specification what a bank needs to offer or how.<p>But all in all PSD2 won't change the world of payment.it will be still easier to just use PayPal:)
I've been frustrated by some time that there's not a generic "look but not touch" function available to 3rd party programs.<p>I'm a lot less concerned about a 3rd party leaking info about my assets than I am about them being able to do things with them.<p>So far, every program or website that wants access to info also gets full rights to sell, buy, transfer, etc.
the author's "about" pages are a cringe-inducing hubris-fest, and that's being charitable.<p><a href="https://chrisskinner.global/#about-us" rel="nofollow">https://chrisskinner.global/#about-us</a>
I created an app that would poll my transaction data from my bank's website and then send push messages to my phone if any new transaction comes in. I loved it. While doing groceries, having not left the line and packing up my goods, I'd get a push message of the transaction. This gave me a real feel for what happened on my bankaccount.<p>When notifo stopped (free API to send push messages without having to write your own native app); I didn't re-implement it, but from time to time, I wished I did; maybe something I should look into again.
This kind of thing would definitely guide my decision as to what bank I keep my money at. If my bank killed digit for example, I'd switch in a heartbeat.<p>I think big banks will learn pretty quickly that they are commodities, and they will need to compete on more than inertia alone.
And for this reason, there's the SimpleFIN spec and SimpleFIN Bridge[1]. Until banks implement the APIs themselves the SimpleFIN Bridge will <i>bridge</i> that gap.<p>[1] <a href="https://bridge.simplefin.org" rel="nofollow">https://bridge.simplefin.org</a>
Yodlee Supports almost all the banks in the world,<p><a href="https://www.yodlee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.yodlee.com/</a>