Retail banking is a classic case of diametrically opposed incentives. Banks rely on the opacity of their products, apathy and the fear that the majority of peop

Retail banking is a classic case of diametrically opposed incentives. Banks rely on the opacity of their products, apathy and the fear that the majority of people have of simply opening their bank statement, to inflict punitive charges on their customers. You want to keep your money, banks want to take it away from you. Banks also depend on cast-iron control of the channel to cross-sell other products and services. The thing about 1st party bank APIs is they completely undermine all of this and that is why they haven't happened. The end-of-days scenario for retail banking is a 3rd party coming along to build a superior banking experience atop of their APIs. The 3rd party starting from a market share of 0 has no choice but to align their incentives with the user in order to grow. This will manifest in apps that proactively warn users before their account incurs charges, notifies users when they do, and present products and services that compete with the banks but are better value for the user. A 3rd party will de facto end up owning the most important banking channel and this will ultimately devastate the bank's revenues. All of this is terrible for the bank but great for the user. When you decompose things into underlying incentives it becomes clear why things have or have not happened and will or will not happen. There are various initiatives to compel banks to provide open APIs, e.g. PSDII in Europe. However considering the aforementioned incentives it seems obvious that banks will not act in good faith and will find any excuse (vague hand-waving to security, fraud, etc) to subvert the UX of the API such that any service built on top of it is awful to use. A concrete example of this is the gestating RBS API, they require a 2FA SMS code before moving money over £30. This is something they do not do and will never do in their own private APIs that power their own mobile apps because users will not stand for it, but they can do this with a public API that has no users to speak of very easily. Considering the current incentives 1st-party banking APIs (at least the ones we would wish to see) will not happen. The only way that can change that is through market forces, i.e. one bank has to provide the APIs that cause material customer churn at other banks. Given this it's clear screen-scraping is going nowhere anytime soon, in fact it will evolve, by directly hooking in to the private APIs that power the banks own APIs for more robust, and fully transactional APIs, i.e. payments and transfers. Disclaimer: I have started a company that does this - https://teller.io/ https://teller.io/