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"Enter bank transactions." Nope. Customer lost. Look, I hate Quickbooks and Quickbooks Online. I really, really do, but I will not use a financial product tha

"Enter bank transactions." Nope. Customer lost. Look, I hate Quickbooks and Quickbooks Online. I really, really do, but I will not use a financial product that doesn't connect to my financial institutions. Period. Do you want to know what MY startup dream is? I want someone to give me money, and then I want to go create a service that kicks the crap out of Yodlee and Intuit's own bank connection system. I want it to use REST APIs when it can, OFX when it should, and intelligent screen scraping when it must. I want to build a startup based on an open core of specifications for how to connect to every financial system in the world. I want that spec to be executable and available as a simple library with bindings to every language you can think of. If you have a new institution or your bank changes and you can fix it, I want you to be able to fork the library and send us a pull request. I want end users to be able to go through a "guided login process". "OK, log in now", "OK, click on the accounts list", "OK click on a transaction". "You're done! We've autogenerated a basic scraper for your bank. Thanks for helping us out." I want to make money off this library by providing a simple, unified REST API behind all this mess that provides the computational resources to handle millions of customers connecting with thousands of institutions. I want this company to provide push notifications so your app can do clever things when people spend money. I don't want you to have to sign an NDA and pay thousands of dollars just to get permission to play with it. I want it to be the Twilio of Banks. But if you want to take the code and go your own way, you can. I really don't know why we've let just a few companies keep our collective financial data locked up for so long. Is it because it's so expensive to get it working? Well why not spend it on people who will create an open, scalable system that can still make money? Instead, we have Mint.com and mvelopes. That's it, really. Have an idea for a personal finance tool that lets you create "virtual subaccounts" for your checking and savings accounts so you can leverage double-entry bookkeeping in your personal finances through a clear metaphor? Great! Now have fun spending 10 minutes every two days copying and pasting stuff from 10 websites into 1. It's just madness. You know that "one weird thing" you're passionate about that's not really related to anything else you're passionate about? This is it for me. P.S.: lubos - this isn't really about you or manager.io. I commend you for making something and getting it out there. This is about the thing that makes every one of these attempts inevitably fail, and it's sad that we're all being held hostage to crappy software because of it. I wish you success, I hope that I'm completely wrong.

girvo 13y ago
I'm working on something like that.
fishtoaster 13y ago
Man, tell me about it. I worked for a company that wanted bank importing, but couldn't afford yodlee's cost structure (since this company was freemium). As such, they built it themselves, and I worked on it for quite a while. It's hard, but totally doable. I really hope they license that technology as an api someday, because a lot of great finance tools could be built on top of it.
Pxtl 13y ago
1) Banks are dinosaurs. 2) Users don't want to give you their username and password for their bank because they're not complete idiots.
- breckinloggins 13y ago
  > Banks are dinosaurs That didn't stop Yodlee or Intuit. > Users don't want to give you their username and password for their bank That just isn't true. Millions of people give them out to Mint.com, and that was before it was ever purchased by Intuit.
aidos 13y ago
Argh. When I hear the word 'bank' I automatically put my head in my hands. I had yodlee wired up to import into xero but there was a manual auth step in between. It was so slow that while distrated, waiting for it to run, I burnt my toast and set off the fire alarm in my building. I have a python script for converting Barclay's PDF statements to csvs and js for ripping my data from HSBC. This is not the wonderful new world I was promised.
- baudehlo 13y ago
  It's not a wonderful world scraping that stuff either. I worked on a startup doing just that - we wrote our own after evaluating the various options including yodlee. The banks make it hard. The only good thing is they evolve like molasses, meaning the crawlers don't break often. But the fragility of it all is crazy. There's a reason yodlee charges so much. Would almost love to see them open source it all. It's such a pain that open source seems like the ideal solution to scaling development of each crawler.

girvo 13y ago

I'm working on something like that.

fishtoaster 13y ago

Man, tell me about it. I worked for a company that wanted bank importing, but couldn't afford yodlee's cost structure (since this company was freemium). As such, they built it themselves, and I worked on it for quite a while. It's hard, but totally doable. I really hope they license that technology as an api someday, because a lot of great finance tools could be built on top of it.

Pxtl 13y ago

1) Banks are dinosaurs. 2) Users don't want to give you their username and password for their bank because they're not complete idiots.

breckinloggins 13y ago
> Banks are dinosaurs That didn't stop Yodlee or Intuit. > Users don't want to give you their username and password for their bank That just isn't true. Millions of people give them out to Mint.com, and that was before it was ever purchased by Intuit.

aidos 13y ago

Argh. When I hear the word 'bank' I automatically put my head in my hands. I had yodlee wired up to import into xero but there was a manual auth step in between. It was so slow that while distrated, waiting for it to run, I burnt my toast and set off the fire alarm in my building. I have a python script for converting Barclay's PDF statements to csvs and js for ripping my data from HSBC. This is not the wonderful new world I was promised.

baudehlo 13y ago
It's not a wonderful world scraping that stuff either. I worked on a startup doing just that - we wrote our own after evaluating the various options including yodlee. The banks make it hard. The only good thing is they evolve like molasses, meaning the crawlers don't break often. But the fragility of it all is crazy. There's a reason yodlee charges so much. Would almost love to see them open source it all. It's such a pain that open source seems like the ideal solution to scaling development of each crawler.