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Ask HN:APIs for banks/financial institutions?
Investment sites like Covestor, Cake Financial or financial sites like Mint, Wesabe, Buxfer often have a 'import' feature where you can import your portfolio/account data from several institutions.
How would I go about getting at some of these APIs? Do I have to go through a 3rd party provider like Yodlee?
- masterj 16y agoThough I haven't looked into it very deeply, I saved this to my evernote account a while ago, and I believe it my be what you're looking for. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange
- sriramk 16y agoTrue but what are the API endpoints? How does one actually get data out of someone?
- djb_hackernews 16y agoI have a lot of experience in this field. Lots of financial websites offer data exports in a variety of formats (html, csv, tab, excel binary, ofx (the format), qfx, xml, etc). Most times those exports are only available through the web interface of the financial institution. I worked on a system that gathered data from over 3000 FIs, and I can't remember any of them having an API for data retrieval. (I don't include OFX). OFX is a whole other beast, it's the protocol the Quicken software uses to communicate with the banks. Often times the data coming out from OFX is drastically different or outdated. Generally the OFX server addresses aren't published publicly(strike this, it appears some people have made lists easy to locate via google, though appears they are out of date...) and if they are published at all they are in the documentation only accessible if you are logged in. One trick is to download a Quicken trial version, and set up some dummy accounts, and see where it tries to login to. Once you have the address you then need the login credentials and an account identifier, which usually isn't ever the same account id you'd expect. But OFX the protocol does have an account discovery feature which is helpful. My best guess is the import features are just importing the csv, tab, excel, etc exports that many banks offer from their web interface.
- sriramk 16y agoInteresting. Does the import feature screen scrape then (fill in credentials, act 'as' the user'? Doesnt sound very scalable.
- djb_hackernews 16y agoAh, I guess I didn't understand the scenario. I assumed these services had an option to import financial data via a file the user uploads. This gets around the whole credentials thing. When you provide these services your login credentials and account information they are most certainly logging in via the web interface just as you would and either downloading the exports themselves or screen scraping the html. The system I was working on was time sensitive so we needed the most up to date and complete data, and unfortunately this usually came in html form (idea being customers rarely looked at the exports, and are quick to report discrepencies in what they do look at which is always atleast the html page). We had built a unified parser/normalizer/lexicon that could understand the financial data from all of the FIs, we just had to download the pages. Which isn't a hard problem and easily distributable.