I made an API for a bank... I was a third party and made the API by screen scraping their webUI. I sent their devs a link and initially there were positive messages going back and forth.<p>The API allowed you to see balance, transaction history, and make payments.<p>Before long, the API got quite popular, and lots of people were using it to make lots of payments automatically.<p>You know what makes money laundering super easy... a banking API so you can split the million dollars you want to launder into 1 million 1 dollar payments. And an API client which lets you treat each login cookie and account as an object in python.<p>Before long, the API and all users who had ever used it were perma-banned from the bank, because it was determined they posed too high a fraud/money-laundering risk.<p>I'm still salty because, after spending a week of my life building and refining that API, they banned me and <i>6 years later</i> still claim they can't return the $350 that was in the account because they are still 'investigating'.
> Anything that you can achieve with PDFs, presence, and persistence in a bank branch you can do with our API.<p>Not sure how to take this. With a small tweak like "you can <i>eventually</i> do" I would let it pass without criticism.<p>I work with bank cores, imaging, BSA and related middleware on a daily basis. The scope and complexity of these systems is incomprehensible to most. Many of our clients don't even try to think about how fucked up their business is. They prefer to hire Deloitte and other vendors like us to be stressed about it for them.<p>To give you an idea of how comprehensive a "full" banking API is, our combined WSDL and XSD references total ~9 megabytes. This is <i>before</i> codegen. The final reference sources as generated into the .NET codebase total nearly 20 megabytes. This is just the types & method signatures. The actual implementations live in an IBM system manufactured some time during the previous millennium.<p>But, none of that really matters. Whatever API method you call against a specific bank will have behavior that ultimately depends on a million things specific to them _and the region within which they operate_. So, its not enough to simply integrate with this massive API. You also have to understand a multi-dimensional matrix of regulations, end-customer behaviors, technological constraints, active geopolitical affairs, et. al.
Thanks @op! Increase employee here:<p>We're early days and not quite ready for open sign-ups yet (sorry, known bug). We'll be more public over the coming weeks and months.<p>We're banking for developers; you can programatically create accounts, cards, and move money.<p>Our users are primarily financial technology companies.<p>We're a small team from Stripe, Robinhood, and Visa building the bank we always wanted. If this sounds interesting to you we're hiring: jobs@increase.com<p>If I can be helpful, I'm at darragh@increase.com.
It sounds cool, but I don't fully understand: is this a fully-fledged US bank (with a banking license, FDIC insurance, audited,...) that allows you to do all banking transactions through an API, or is this a framework that you can use if you are already a bank to expose all your transactions through an API, or something else?
Their lead UI guy was previously the UI lead at Stripe. I think of him as someone who appreciates and understands the importance of well-thought-out UI so I'm looking forward to how Increase pans out for that reason in particular.
From reading the comments there are two groups of people. People who don't know what a banking API is and why you'd need one. And people who do but don't understand how Increase is different from existing Banking API / Banking As A Service solutions. I'm in the latter.
I think by the amount of "what is this" questions in this thread it's pretty clear the messaging is confusing to say the least. I'm going to pile on because even with the explanations in this thread I don't really understand what this is. Is this for B2C or B2B? Is this something I, the average consumer who happens to be a developer, could use to build my own personal finance tools?
Is there any service like this for individuals? Specifically, I want to be able to open and close checking accounts at will with different card numbers, with different spending limits. The purpose would be to serve as an envelope system and budgeting tool.
I led a team building a similar thing for one of the existing big three bank technology companies. Hope you've got backpressure and all the compliance work locked-in. Outages and some serious audits are in your future integrating with those more legacy bank cores.<p>Wish your team all the best! This sort of innovation / competition is needed in that space.
It's notable that Monzo (UK fintech bank, but now in many countries) has a fairly complete but not really advertised API. Their mobile app uses the same API.<p>If you need to know which emoji is most representative of the shop where you used your card 7 seconds ago, you can get sent that (and a lot of other data) in a webhook...
from TOS [0]:<p>Increase is not a chartered depository institution. We work with our partner banks to provide depository and payment services. When you open an Increase account, you agree to the Increase Terms of Service below. When you use the Increase service to set up a deposit account, the account is with First Internet Bank or Blue Ridge Bank and is subject to your agreement with the Bank Terms below. Finally, Increase's use of your personal information is described in the Privacy Policy below.<p>[0] <a href="https://increase.com/terms" rel="nofollow">https://increase.com/terms</a>
Seems like bbaas, banking backend as a service, solves a significant need in the world, considering existing alternatives. For example in Europe there’s Mambu that seems to do something similar.<p>Not sure what the exact customer pain is here, could be that banks were the first to adopt IT and now have a large legacy where there is little value in rebuilding it with modern stacks, as it offers little competitive differentiation.<p>Or maybe there’s a need to quickly bring new banking products to market, and the backend stuff is so standardized that it’s best to buy it off the shelve.
I'm in the banking API space. Yes, the current technology is decrepit and garbage. It's not the bottleneck though. Risk management and underwriting is. If you want to build a SaaS in this space, the hard part is figuring out how to vet customers cheaply and quickly. Every customer you sign up is a potential OFAC (Office of Foreign Access Control), BSA (Banking Secrecy Act), or AML (Anti-Money Laundering) violation.
> Accounts are eligible to receive interest on balances. The interest rate is the Federal Funds Target Rate less 50 basis points with a floor of 0%.<p>Target rate right now is 2.25-2.50%, so i'm guessing that you are subtracting 50 BP from the lower end, so that's 1.75%. That's actually pretty good for a bank right now (not the highest, but certainly on the high<i>er</i> end.<p>One thing that's unclear... is this a checking account, savings, etc.?
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.<p>This is one of the reasons why I say that the EU is corrupt.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's dirty, exclusive and corrupt and no one is doing anything about it.
> “Our API faithfully exposes the data and capabilities of the Federal Reserve, Visa, The Clearing House, depository networks, and accounting tools. It’s lovingly boring and exceptionally powerful.”<p>Two questions:<p>1. How is this different than Open Banking?<p>2. Why is Visa referenced / why isn’t Mastercard included? (Is it because Mastercard owns Finicity, and Open Banking service)
Doesn't look like they provide an API for any sort of brokerage services. I have written a lot of sqlite to track my progress with buying/selling stock options but the biggest pain point for me is transcribing my transactions into my sqlite database. If they expand their API to brokerage services then this could be a killer feature for me.
The underlying banks are Blue Ridge Bank and First Internet Bank terms. Blue ridge is popular for powering BAAS companies like Unit. Not sure of First Internet Bank, but both of these are legit, and the fact that they got two banks to start with is a great accomplishment.
Is there any information on the website about the company providing the service, and/or its founder(s)? I found the official name "Increase, Inc" in the privacy policy page, but nothing more.<p>Aren't these fundamentals to build trust, especially for a B2B banking product?
All you need already is at Solid Financial at <a href="https://www.solidfi.com/docs/introduction" rel="nofollow">https://www.solidfi.com/docs/introduction</a> (Developer Center). Recently raised $63M Series B.
Is this like Vodeno in europe? When looking at job listings, I realized that Aion Bank appears to be just a marketing wrapper around Vodeno, which handles all the administration, technical stuff and even banking license and customer support.
Seems to be similar to Modern Treasury [1]. Are the use-cases similar between Increase and [1]?<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.moderntreasury.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.moderntreasury.com/</a>
Two questions:<p>1) What does this provide over other BaaS vendors, for example Treasury Prime, Unit, Synapse, Lithic, etc?<p>2) Why are the ACH fees so horrifically high? Even a fifth of that is really on the high end.
Sounds a lot like <a href="https://www.solarisgroup.com/en/" rel="nofollow">https://www.solarisgroup.com/en/</a>
see also: <a href="http://unit.co" rel="nofollow">http://unit.co</a><p>you can programatically create accounts & cards and test with real money - in minutes!<p><a href="https://www.unit.co/how-to-build" rel="nofollow">https://www.unit.co/how-to-build</a>
I'm a bit confused about why one would want to do this! If you become your own bank, what are the pieces you have to do yourself? (I imagine things like fraud?)