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I'd like to have something like this for Germany. I am willing to pay 10€/month for a simple API access to my bank account. I need neither hosted code nor push.

I'd like to have something like this for Germany. I am willing to pay 10€/month for a simple API access to my bank account. I need neither hosted code nor push. Just give me remote access for my scripts. Probably I'm asking for the impossible because of the heavy regulation in Germany but just wanted to put it out there.

1ba9115454 10y ago
Have you thought about using a headless browser or web scraping?
- egeozcan 10y ago
  A friend of mine did this but after two times web access being disabled for his account because "suspicious activity" he stopped. Second time he actually tried very hard to simulate a human with delays, user-agent, browser capabilities and so on but didn't help.
  - ic4l 10y ago
    This is getting harder and harder. Chrome allows you to do a .click but it also sends a tainted flag. I'm not sure if headless browses also send non-tainted events.
duozerk 10y ago
You can simulate a browser and act as if you're a normal, browser using customer. Encapsulate it and you've got an "API"; though it'll be a bit painful as a lot of banks' web backends are fucked up and you'll need to keep up to date with their changes, but still. I did it for my French bank account at one point (get balance + submit transfer).
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Your comment might be the first I've seen justifying the use of Electron. ;)
- lioeters 10y ago
  Apparently, some used this technique for actual commercial services, which was partly motivation (they called it "screen scraping") for the European Commission's recent directive to require banks to allow authorized third-party access to customer account data. https://paymentscompliance.com/premium-content/insights_analysis/payment-initiation-and-screen-scraping-legal-tussle-heart-psd2 https://paymentscompliance.com/premium-content/insights_anal...
thesimon 10y ago
N26 has got a quite decent REST API if you are willing to use your dev tools for a bit :) Edit: Most banks also seem to support FinTS [0], but it seems a bit of a PITA. Edit 2: figo might be worth a try as well, though I don't know their pricing. Edit 3: bunq is quite nice as well. I implemented a few basic calls in node when they launched the API. Not the easiest API to work with, but acceptable. [0]: https://www.hbci-zka.de/index.htm https://www.hbci-zka.de/index.htm [1]: https://www.figo.io/en/ https://www.figo.io/en/ [2]: https://www.bunq.com/de/api https://www.bunq.com/de/api [3]: https://github.com/c0dr/bunq https://github.com/c0dr/bunq
- knd775 10y ago
  Every time I see anything about N26, I am quite disappointed that it isn't available in the US.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    It is quite good, but it's not perfect. The apps look non-native and the UI has many issues (e.g. entering 10 international characters quickly in the "transfer note" box pops up 10 "only latin characters" notifications), the login UI looks weird on Firefox, and http://my.n26.com/ http://my.n26.com/ causes an infinite loop that I reported weeks ago. Other than that, I'm very satisfied with the service, and I use them as my bank bank, but I use Revolut (revolut.com) for my everyday transactions, just because it "feels" nicer. The transparent N26 card definitely turns heads, though, cashiers are always asking me about that.
    - Semaphor 10y ago
      > The transparent N26 card definitely turns heads, though, cashiers are always asking me about that. Weirdly enough barely anyone in Germany ever commented on it while in South Africa people do so every time I'm at a store :D
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Rrrreeeeally? That's extremely interesting. It's not officially supported, though, is it? Still, it might be nice for various scripts.
captainmuon 10y ago
I doubt it's even regulation, just inertia. There used to be (still is?) an API called HBCI, but to my knowlegdge that required a smartcard (maybe not to bad an idea) and was mostly read-only. I think in the early 2000s you could use things like Quicken and MS Money to do homebanking (is this why some people in Germany still have the impression that it is dangerous and complicated?) I think what "Sofortüberweisung.com" initially did was just to scrape the websites of all major banks, and use the HTML as an API. Then the banks found out they could not do much against it legally (and also fearing backlash because they had no good website-payment solution themselves), and they made some agreements.
- mweibel 10y ago
  It still is though it's recently called FinTS. Most german banks implement it and it's read/write usually. Every bank has some specialities (even sometimes some bank branches have specialities) so it's usually not _that_ easy to implement if you want support for all banks.
  - wdick 10y ago
    "All" banks in Germany are run by less than 10 data centers. The second biggest, Fiducia, operates about 600 banks. This is one API for 600 banks. For the API - almost all business accounts support HBCI or EBICS. For example my tax accountant and tax software have full access to my business account.
joshuakarjala 10y ago
There is https://www.figo.io/en/figo-for-every-service/ https://www.figo.io/en/figo-for-every-service/ and https://www.solarisbank.de/ https://www.solarisbank.de/
felixge 10y ago
AFAIK the best way to access German bank accounts programmatically is AqBanking, which is used by e.g. GNUCash. It also comes with a CLI: https://www.aquamaniac.de/sites/aqbanking/cli.php https://www.aquamaniac.de/sites/aqbanking/cli.php
- egeozcan 10y ago
  Sieht gut aus! I'll give it a try, thank you.
matt4077 10y ago
FinTS kinda works, and there some libraries out there to make life easier, but it's still somewhat terrible. PSD2 is coming, tough, and I'm hoping it will improve the situation: https://www.evry.com/en/news/articles/psd2-the-directive-that-will-change-banking-as-we-know-it/ https://www.evry.com/en/news/articles/psd2-the-directive-tha...
h43z 10y ago
I have written my own script which makes use of AqBanking-CLI. Postbank does support HBCI.
eb0la 10y ago
For spain, too. Actually I am forwarding this to a friend in a huge bank. Hope this helps :-)

1ba9115454 10y ago

Have you thought about using a headless browser or web scraping?

egeozcan 10y ago
A friend of mine did this but after two times web access being disabled for his account because "suspicious activity" he stopped. Second time he actually tried very hard to simulate a human with delays, user-agent, browser capabilities and so on but didn't help.
- ic4l 10y ago
  This is getting harder and harder. Chrome allows you to do a .click but it also sends a tainted flag. I'm not sure if headless browses also send non-tainted events.

duozerk 10y ago

You can simulate a browser and act as if you're a normal, browser using customer. Encapsulate it and you've got an "API"; though it'll be a bit painful as a lot of banks' web backends are fucked up and you'll need to keep up to date with their changes, but still. I did it for my French bank account at one point (get balance + submit transfer).

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Your comment might be the first I've seen justifying the use of Electron. ;)
lioeters 10y ago
Apparently, some used this technique for actual commercial services, which was partly motivation (they called it "screen scraping") for the European Commission's recent directive to require banks to allow authorized third-party access to customer account data. https://paymentscompliance.com/premium-content/insights_analysis/payment-initiation-and-screen-scraping-legal-tussle-heart-psd2 https://paymentscompliance.com/premium-content/insights_anal...

thesimon 10y ago

N26 has got a quite decent REST API if you are willing to use your dev tools for a bit :) Edit: Most banks also seem to support FinTS [0], but it seems a bit of a PITA. Edit 2: figo might be worth a try as well, though I don't know their pricing. Edit 3: bunq is quite nice as well. I implemented a few basic calls in node when they launched the API. Not the easiest API to work with, but acceptable. [0]: https://www.hbci-zka.de/index.htm https://www.hbci-zka.de/index.htm [1]: https://www.figo.io/en/ https://www.figo.io/en/ [2]: https://www.bunq.com/de/api https://www.bunq.com/de/api [3]: https://github.com/c0dr/bunq https://github.com/c0dr/bunq

knd775 10y ago
Every time I see anything about N26, I am quite disappointed that it isn't available in the US.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  It is quite good, but it's not perfect. The apps look non-native and the UI has many issues (e.g. entering 10 international characters quickly in the "transfer note" box pops up 10 "only latin characters" notifications), the login UI looks weird on Firefox, and http://my.n26.com/ http://my.n26.com/ causes an infinite loop that I reported weeks ago. Other than that, I'm very satisfied with the service, and I use them as my bank bank, but I use Revolut (revolut.com) for my everyday transactions, just because it "feels" nicer. The transparent N26 card definitely turns heads, though, cashiers are always asking me about that.
  - Semaphor 10y ago
    > The transparent N26 card definitely turns heads, though, cashiers are always asking me about that. Weirdly enough barely anyone in Germany ever commented on it while in South Africa people do so every time I'm at a store :D
StavrosK 10y ago
Rrrreeeeally? That's extremely interesting. It's not officially supported, though, is it? Still, it might be nice for various scripts.

captainmuon 10y ago

I doubt it's even regulation, just inertia. There used to be (still is?) an API called HBCI, but to my knowlegdge that required a smartcard (maybe not to bad an idea) and was mostly read-only. I think in the early 2000s you could use things like Quicken and MS Money to do homebanking (is this why some people in Germany still have the impression that it is dangerous and complicated?) I think what "Sofortüberweisung.com" initially did was just to scrape the websites of all major banks, and use the HTML as an API. Then the banks found out they could not do much against it legally (and also fearing backlash because they had no good website-payment solution themselves), and they made some agreements.

mweibel 10y ago
It still is though it's recently called FinTS. Most german banks implement it and it's read/write usually. Every bank has some specialities (even sometimes some bank branches have specialities) so it's usually not _that_ easy to implement if you want support for all banks.
- wdick 10y ago
  "All" banks in Germany are run by less than 10 data centers. The second biggest, Fiducia, operates about 600 banks. This is one API for 600 banks. For the API - almost all business accounts support HBCI or EBICS. For example my tax accountant and tax software have full access to my business account.

joshuakarjala 10y ago

There is https://www.figo.io/en/figo-for-every-service/ https://www.figo.io/en/figo-for-every-service/ and https://www.solarisbank.de/ https://www.solarisbank.de/

felixge 10y ago

AFAIK the best way to access German bank accounts programmatically is AqBanking, which is used by e.g. GNUCash. It also comes with a CLI: https://www.aquamaniac.de/sites/aqbanking/cli.php https://www.aquamaniac.de/sites/aqbanking/cli.php

egeozcan 10y ago
Sieht gut aus! I'll give it a try, thank you.

matt4077 10y ago

FinTS kinda works, and there some libraries out there to make life easier, but it's still somewhat terrible. PSD2 is coming, tough, and I'm hoping it will improve the situation: https://www.evry.com/en/news/articles/psd2-the-directive-that-will-change-banking-as-we-know-it/ https://www.evry.com/en/news/articles/psd2-the-directive-tha...

h43z 10y ago

I have written my own script which makes use of AqBanking-CLI. Postbank does support HBCI.

eb0la 10y ago

For spain, too. Actually I am forwarding this to a friend in a huge bank. Hope this helps :-)