Actually nearly every German bank has offered API access to accounts to their customers since forever...20 or 30 years or so. It was called HBCI, then it was re

Actually nearly every German bank has offered API access to accounts to their customers since forever...20 or 30 years or so. It was called HBCI, then it was renamed to FinTS, and it was the most advanced and well-supported API to bank accounts with practically no parallel anywhere in the world. The killer feature was that it was standardized rather well, and every bank supported it, so it was no problem to get programs and apps that could speak to your 5 banks where you have 8 accounts and merge those into a single UI (there were even open-source implementations of the protocol to build bank support into your own applications). You could fetch transactions, but also trigger transactions, with no bank-specific website and - very important - no other middlemen of any kind involved. Then came all those new app-based banks like N26, and instead of implementing FinTS, they decided to just offer their proprietary app, and that's it. Some later implemented some kind of proprietary API as an alternative to FinTS (maybe FinTS wasn't hipster enough, because it's a bit old-school, XML-based instead of another REST-style HTTP thing with JSON), but those always lacked the core feature of FinTS, which is broad support of the same standard by many banks. And now we're getting PSD2, which in some ways wants to establish broad (mandated by law) support over many banks again, but not by specifying an API designed to be used by customers, but by businesses only. Hence what we in Germany were able to do as customers for a long time - magically access dozens of accounts at different banks from a single application and without ANY middlemen involved - is now gradually becoming an ability that only corporations will have, because as a private individual it's practically impossible to meet the requirements to get access to PSD2 APIs (even though they basically do the same as FinTS already did for decades), and banks are already toying around with the idea of shutting down their FinTS API gateways somewhere in the future, because that other protocol is legally mandated and FinTS isn't.