3 ms·

Do most banks not have an API? If you use software (e.g. something from Intuit) that accesses your banking info, is it likely screen-scraping?

dmritard96 10y ago
Have suspected this for a while. Its amazingly brittle if so (coming from someone that has done ALOT of scraping). I suppose Bank UIs change slower than the likes of amazon or retail but still. Pretty pathetic
- oasisbob 10y ago
  Some banks intentionally break screen scraping. Having your customer's data is a competitive advantage when it comes to cross-selling other services.
  - jasonjei 10y ago
    To do my own personal and business accounting I used the iOS APIs that I discovered by using Charles. I don't remember if I had to disable certificate pinning. But that's one way of getting your bank account information fed to a data source.
nilved 10y ago
Yep
yegle 10y ago
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settings https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settin...
- fatbob 10y ago
  Wells Fargo charges $3/month just for read access.
chillacy 10y ago
Mint used to use Yodlee which did web scraping when no API was available, but has since transitioned to using bank APIs it seems: http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/2212/how-does-mint-com-connect-to-online-banks-in-order-to-get-or-download-transactio http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/2212/how-does-mint-...
- curun1r 10y ago
  Not entirely. Mint only used Yodlee at the beginning, before Intuit acquired them, and that was a while ago. Even before the acquisition, they had a secret project to create a backup scraping platform because they worried that Yodlee would cut them off when the acquisition was announced. Mint now uses an internal service (called FICDS, IIRC, but I'm no longer at Intuit) that still scrapes. That service also handles bank interactions for Quickbooks, TurboTax and Quicken, though the latter was sold off, so may be moving to something else. Additionally, that service allows the use of tokenization, which greatly reduces the chances that account credentials would leak based on a vulnerability in Mint or a rogue employee, since that team is pretty locked down and Mint, TurboTax and Quickbooks never store banking credentials. As an aside, I wonder why Wells picked Xero to trial their API. It could have been a lot more impactful by doing a trial with Intuit, especially if they could have had it ready by tax season. Also, here's a fun fact: For a number of years, Mint employees at Intuit could not see their own employee stock plans in Mint. Morgan Stanley's site was a Flash monstrosity that couldn't be scraped correctly. Asking them about it earned you a well-practiced eye roll.
  - oasisbob 10y ago
    It could have been a lot more impactful by doing a trial with Intuit Given Intuit's checkered past with QFX, If I were writing a nascent API for FX, I wouldn't want them anywhere near it.
spangry 10y ago
Correct. Most banks are running back end infrastructure from the 80s with lots of manual or semi-manual processes (e.g. overnight interbank batch reconciliation, at least in Australia). From an outsider's perspective, it appears that retail bank management is completely technically illiterate. Which unfortunately also makes them the perfect marks for being sold inappropriate tech solutions (see: blockchain mania).
- shaftway 10y ago
  From an insider's perspective, yes. They are completely technically illiterate. Banks. Exchanges. Brokers. The whole financial services industry.
  - spangry 10y ago
    Oh yeah, don't get me started on exchanges. I'm astounded at how bad their technical processes are. The ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) has something like a 3 day time to settlement. And I'm told it's one of the more 'modern' exchanges (I guess the other ones are still using stock tickers and abacuses).
    - meric 10y ago
      Unfortunately 2 days now. I appreciate the time to settlement because I could buy my shares and pay 2 days later. Sometimes it takes time to get funds from other accounts, and I wanted to buy (or sell) today, for example, when the quarterly just came out.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    Part of me wants to sneer in disgust, but part of me considers that we live and work in a tech industry that truly, honestly believes that "move fast and break things" is a great design principle, and maybe we don't want those people in charge of the foundation of the global economy. I dunno.
- rectang 10y ago
  Perhaps open source projects such as Apache Fineract (incubating) can leapfrog the slow-moving giants. http://fineract.incubator.apache.org/ http://fineract.incubator.apache.org/ Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked.

dmritard96 10y ago

Have suspected this for a while. Its amazingly brittle if so (coming from someone that has done ALOT of scraping). I suppose Bank UIs change slower than the likes of amazon or retail but still. Pretty pathetic

oasisbob 10y ago
Some banks intentionally break screen scraping. Having your customer's data is a competitive advantage when it comes to cross-selling other services.
- jasonjei 10y ago
  To do my own personal and business accounting I used the iOS APIs that I discovered by using Charles. I don't remember if I had to disable certificate pinning. But that's one way of getting your bank account information fed to a data source.

nilved 10y ago

Yep

yegle 10y ago

https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settings https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settin...

fatbob 10y ago
Wells Fargo charges $3/month just for read access.

chillacy 10y ago

Mint used to use Yodlee which did web scraping when no API was available, but has since transitioned to using bank APIs it seems: http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/2212/how-does-mint-com-connect-to-online-banks-in-order-to-get-or-download-transactio http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/2212/how-does-mint-...

curun1r 10y ago
Not entirely. Mint only used Yodlee at the beginning, before Intuit acquired them, and that was a while ago. Even before the acquisition, they had a secret project to create a backup scraping platform because they worried that Yodlee would cut them off when the acquisition was announced. Mint now uses an internal service (called FICDS, IIRC, but I'm no longer at Intuit) that still scrapes. That service also handles bank interactions for Quickbooks, TurboTax and Quicken, though the latter was sold off, so may be moving to something else. Additionally, that service allows the use of tokenization, which greatly reduces the chances that account credentials would leak based on a vulnerability in Mint or a rogue employee, since that team is pretty locked down and Mint, TurboTax and Quickbooks never store banking credentials. As an aside, I wonder why Wells picked Xero to trial their API. It could have been a lot more impactful by doing a trial with Intuit, especially if they could have had it ready by tax season. Also, here's a fun fact: For a number of years, Mint employees at Intuit could not see their own employee stock plans in Mint. Morgan Stanley's site was a Flash monstrosity that couldn't be scraped correctly. Asking them about it earned you a well-practiced eye roll.
- oasisbob 10y ago
  It could have been a lot more impactful by doing a trial with Intuit Given Intuit's checkered past with QFX, If I were writing a nascent API for FX, I wouldn't want them anywhere near it.

spangry 10y ago

Correct. Most banks are running back end infrastructure from the 80s with lots of manual or semi-manual processes (e.g. overnight interbank batch reconciliation, at least in Australia). From an outsider's perspective, it appears that retail bank management is completely technically illiterate. Which unfortunately also makes them the perfect marks for being sold inappropriate tech solutions (see: blockchain mania).

shaftway 10y ago
From an insider's perspective, yes. They are completely technically illiterate. Banks. Exchanges. Brokers. The whole financial services industry.
- spangry 10y ago
  Oh yeah, don't get me started on exchanges. I'm astounded at how bad their technical processes are. The ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) has something like a 3 day time to settlement. And I'm told it's one of the more 'modern' exchanges (I guess the other ones are still using stock tickers and abacuses).
  - meric 10y ago
    Unfortunately 2 days now. I appreciate the time to settlement because I could buy my shares and pay 2 days later. Sometimes it takes time to get funds from other accounts, and I wanted to buy (or sell) today, for example, when the quarterly just came out.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  Part of me wants to sneer in disgust, but part of me considers that we live and work in a tech industry that truly, honestly believes that "move fast and break things" is a great design principle, and maybe we don't want those people in charge of the foundation of the global economy. I dunno.
rectang 10y ago
Perhaps open source projects such as Apache Fineract (incubating) can leapfrog the slow-moving giants. http://fineract.incubator.apache.org/ http://fineract.incubator.apache.org/ Apache Fineract (\’fīn-,ә-,rakt\) is an open source system for core banking as a platform. Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked.