8 ms·

> I suspect the problem is that most customers just don't care. IMO the reason is they (perfectly rationally) realised after spending several million building

> I suspect the problem is that most customers just don't care. IMO the reason is they (perfectly rationally) realised after spending several million building an authorised bank that APIs are a pure downside scenario for them, i.e. intermediation risk. Why spend so much money to stand up a de novo bank and let everyone else capture the value? 99% of the value is top of stack. This is why no market in the world has provided 1st party banking APIs for retail products. It's taken regulators to do so in Europe and the results of that (predictably) fell short of what everybody had hoped. No criticism of Monzo for this. Based on their incentives this was the rational course of action.

lol768 8y ago
You have a point, and I agree OB has been disappointing. I think there's a middle ground where you offer something that still provides value for personal use, attracts potential patnerships (see Flux) but doesn't give away the "keys to the kingdom" so others can profit off of your work without you, as a bank, benefitting from building the platform in the first place. I suspect there are is a decent number of 'techies' and early adopters who found Monzo's API, despite its limitations, attractive to them. I've used it to save myself a bunch of time with expenses and it's nice to know that, if I wanted to, I could use the internal API too. In its current state, Monzo could easily expand the existing personal API (which deliberately doesn't allow you to scale - only whitelisted user IDs can use your OAuth client) whilst minimising intermediation risk, provided that they didn't add the same endpoints to AISP API.