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Open banking is really something that needs to be mandated by regulators. That's what happened in the UK, and now you have a wide choice of financial apps that

Open banking is really something that needs to be mandated by regulators. That's what happened in the UK, and now you have a wide choice of financial apps that can access accounts at any bank that implements the standard UK Open Banking APIs: https://www.openbanking.org.uk https://www.openbanking.org.uk

azureel 4y ago
Open Banking is a great concept. Also Turkey has an own local version of it and improving. It's in Turkish but translate will help you get the idea: https://ohvps.github.io/v1.0.2/contents/odeme-emri-baslatma-hizmeti.html#_6-1-adim-0-odeme-emri-baslatma-istegi https://ohvps.github.io/v1.0.2/contents/odeme-emri-baslatma-...
delusional 4y ago
You're missing part of my point. Here in Denmark it supposedly already is a legal requirement. The point is that the legal obligation means nothing, because the banks are so entangled with the government that no actual policing is done. Here's the api documentation of 25 Danish banks, including the one I'm a part of: https://apiportal.prod.bec.dk/openbanking/sandbox/product/17/api/14 https://apiportal.prod.bec.dk/openbanking/sandbox/product/17...
Nextgrid 4y ago
I worked with this in the UK - the regulation needs standards with regards to uptime, functionality, data quality and frequent audits to ensure banks are actually compliant. At the moment, besides the neobanks that somewhat know what they’re doing, everyone else’s Open Banking APIs have significant problems that make them unusable for anything serious.
- Reason077 4y ago
  Uptime and performance seems to be monitored pretty closely since 2020: https://www.openbanking.org.uk/api-performance/ https://www.openbanking.org.uk/api-performance/ These figures only include the “top 9” UK banks that are required to implement open banking, not smaller banks like Monzo. I’d argue that open banking is already being used for lots of serious stuff. Credit checking, for example. And of course pretty much any accounting/financial software supports open banking now days.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Ironically the smaller banks like Monzo are the only ones that actually do a decent job. By serious stuff I meant stuff that requires perfect accuracy and integrity - credit checking wouldn't care if you're missing one transaction here or there, or if the timestamps are a little off. But for accountancy, perfect accuracy is required and OB with legacy banks is far from perfect in that regard - the data quality is bad, you get missing/duplicate transactions, timestamps are off (due to TZ issues). Modern banks are the only ones where the data is any good. For accountancy services, this ends up causing significant support overhead to companies where customers complain their numbers are off and the company can't do anything because the bank sends incorrect data, not to mention engineering overhead where you have to try and clean up the data in-house (the problems are different for each bank, so you have to essentially reverse-engineer how each bank mangles the data and implement bank-specific workarounds). > Uptime and performance seems to be monitored pretty closely since 2020 Uptime, sure. I too can make a 100% uptime API that returns random data. When it comes to data quality, there didn't seem to be any authority (in terms of real, practical outcomes - not theoretical powers that never end up being used like the GDPR for example) to complain to - which I find to be a fatal mistake in a situation where banks otherwise have zero incentive to provide a functional & usable OB API (in fact, OB is detrimental to their business as it would allow customers to use a third-party's - often better - service over the bank's own one). Even the OB "gateways" like Plaid, TrueLayer, etc have their hands tied when it comes to this - once the issue is confirmed to be with the bank, the lead time on getting any kind of resolution is often months, during which you have a disgruntled customer breathing down your neck and blaming you for the problem.

azureel 4y ago

Open Banking is a great concept. Also Turkey has an own local version of it and improving. It's in Turkish but translate will help you get the idea: https://ohvps.github.io/v1.0.2/contents/odeme-emri-baslatma-hizmeti.html#_6-1-adim-0-odeme-emri-baslatma-istegi https://ohvps.github.io/v1.0.2/contents/odeme-emri-baslatma-...

delusional 4y ago

You're missing part of my point. Here in Denmark it supposedly already is a legal requirement. The point is that the legal obligation means nothing, because the banks are so entangled with the government that no actual policing is done. Here's the api documentation of 25 Danish banks, including the one I'm a part of: https://apiportal.prod.bec.dk/openbanking/sandbox/product/17/api/14 https://apiportal.prod.bec.dk/openbanking/sandbox/product/17...

Nextgrid 4y ago

I worked with this in the UK - the regulation needs standards with regards to uptime, functionality, data quality and frequent audits to ensure banks are actually compliant. At the moment, besides the neobanks that somewhat know what they’re doing, everyone else’s Open Banking APIs have significant problems that make them unusable for anything serious.

Reason077 4y ago
Uptime and performance seems to be monitored pretty closely since 2020: https://www.openbanking.org.uk/api-performance/ https://www.openbanking.org.uk/api-performance/ These figures only include the “top 9” UK banks that are required to implement open banking, not smaller banks like Monzo. I’d argue that open banking is already being used for lots of serious stuff. Credit checking, for example. And of course pretty much any accounting/financial software supports open banking now days.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Ironically the smaller banks like Monzo are the only ones that actually do a decent job. By serious stuff I meant stuff that requires perfect accuracy and integrity - credit checking wouldn't care if you're missing one transaction here or there, or if the timestamps are a little off. But for accountancy, perfect accuracy is required and OB with legacy banks is far from perfect in that regard - the data quality is bad, you get missing/duplicate transactions, timestamps are off (due to TZ issues). Modern banks are the only ones where the data is any good. For accountancy services, this ends up causing significant support overhead to companies where customers complain their numbers are off and the company can't do anything because the bank sends incorrect data, not to mention engineering overhead where you have to try and clean up the data in-house (the problems are different for each bank, so you have to essentially reverse-engineer how each bank mangles the data and implement bank-specific workarounds). > Uptime and performance seems to be monitored pretty closely since 2020 Uptime, sure. I too can make a 100% uptime API that returns random data. When it comes to data quality, there didn't seem to be any authority (in terms of real, practical outcomes - not theoretical powers that never end up being used like the GDPR for example) to complain to - which I find to be a fatal mistake in a situation where banks otherwise have zero incentive to provide a functional & usable OB API (in fact, OB is detrimental to their business as it would allow customers to use a third-party's - often better - service over the bank's own one). Even the OB "gateways" like Plaid, TrueLayer, etc have their hands tied when it comes to this - once the issue is confirmed to be with the bank, the lead time on getting any kind of resolution is often months, during which you have a disgruntled customer breathing down your neck and blaming you for the problem.