I didn't understand that article. Maybe I don't have enough context.<p><i>"share their bank data with other parties"</i><p>What? Who wants to share their what now with whom? Why would they do that?<p><i>"Fintechs like Plaid, TrueLayer and Tink have founded their businesses on providing access to regulated banking data for a fee.."</i><p>What data? Aggregated? Individual banking? What regulated data? What regulations?<p><i>"Under current banking regulation, raw data must be provided for free to consumers via an official application programming interface (or API). As a result, the apps pick up the cost on behalf of their users."</i><p>What? My bank doesn't offer an API. I have no idea what that last sentance even means. What cost?<p>It really seems like the article assumes a lot of background knowledge. Anybody have an ELI5 link?
Open banking isn't what it sounds like...<p>You would imagine that with open banking I could write my own code to pay my bills, send out birthday gifts, or pay my employees...<p>I imagine I could enable a trusted third party to automatically switch my bank account from one that earns 0.1% interest to one that earns 1% interest... Or to detect that I was double billed for amazon prime and auto refund one. Or maybe it would let me create temporary bank accounts for a payment (so that I can't be overbilled).<p>Yet it turns out that it's not really more than a csv dump of your statement. It's read only, and has barely any more data than the pdf files available from the bank. Pretty much all you can do with it is draw pretty graphs that anyone could draw in excel in 5 minutes. Oh, and some evil companies demand to have access to your bank statement via openbanking to check if you are 'worthy' of a job/loan/school.
This article is almost incoherent. I'm really surprised to see it rank here. It's useful neither to folks who know about open banking (because they would learn nothing new), nor to people new to open banking (because it doesn't explain even the basics of how it's meant to work).<p>Open banking is meant to allow any third party to get your financial information if you agree, just like any app can implement social auth with Google/Twitter/GitHub.<p>But (pasting a comment I wrote here 2 years ago):<p>"By using Plaid or an Open Banking service from another party (e.g. Experian) you'll pay fees to get information you can get for free if you integrate directly with the banks.<p>Even though the open banking APIs are uniform, any company wishing to use them still has to register with each and every bank, and test the integration works with each one. Until you've done it once, it's hard to know whether it will be easy (you write the code once, and it works flawlessly for all banks) or you have edge cases (e.g. some banks have funny timeout issues). So if you're a developer on a deadline, you will likely prefer to use a single API."
I wish I could give my banks/FIs a token which allows the bank/FI to just drop my data (like transactions) into my Google Drive in some machine-readable format like CSV. Then I could use an offline tool of my choosing to analyze the data. Why can't it be this simple?
The entire PSD2 directive laying the groundwork for open banking is a disaster, IMHO. It seeks to do the right things but then completely ignores identity and authorization as a problem. It kinda matters, which organizations you authorize to access your financial data and how do they know it’s you. All that given the eIDAS directive is in place laying at least groundwork for EU-wide identities.<p>It has a glass ceiling to it: the more popular it gets the more fraud there is going to be the less popular it is.
Open Finance is quite possible without giving your user name and password, by using a similar approach as Open Banking API. Which platform require you to give your credentials?
I yearn for better personal financial software with things like purchase queues, a simple “should I buy this?” UI, and a way to quickly calculate the downstream effects of financial decisions. Open banking, or at least clean, timely bank data is prerequisite to anything like that, but it’s been elusive for solo devs in the US. The UK and EU is far ahead in that regard.
The #1 financial integration feature missing from ~all banks ~everywhere for most users is secure transaction notifications. Granted, this is significantly complicated by cancellation, deferred settlement, bank fees as an externally accounted figure, debit states and failed transactions with rollbacks or associated credits. But just a dumb integration would be enough for many uses and would allow firing a substantial number of accountants. It's not too tongue in cheek to suggest that the whole hosted-accounting world is largely playing off this one feature + pretty graphs.<p>Thoughts on future settlement protocols: <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protocol/master/draft-ifex-00.txt" rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco...</a>
Quite surprised to see a sponsored post make the front page of hn.<p>I'm planning to utilize the UK version to aggregate my transactions via a read only interface. That seems relatively safe & think I can wrangle the half a dozen accounts with python into some sort of coherent view.<p>Someone hacked together a bash version of it already:<p><a href="https://gitlab.com/emorrp1/accounts" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/emorrp1/accounts</a>