3 ms·

Interesting. Does the import feature screen scrape then (fill in credentials, act 'as' the user'? Doesnt sound very scalable.

• djb_hackernews 16y ago
  Ah, 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.