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This is absolutely amazing. I say this as someone that's incredibly frustrated with the access my bank gives me to my account data. Anyone have any idea why ba

by zo1 12y ago

This is absolutely amazing. I say this as someone that's incredibly frustrated with the access my bank gives me to my account data. Anyone have any idea why banks are so closed-minded regarding opening up their data via APIs? I suppose, now that I think about it, there are all sorts of regulation hoops that need to be jumped through. Something as simple as "a financial institution requires positive document identification of client to release bank statements", which sounds good on paper, but makes API-enabling an absolute legal nightmare.

rodgerd 12y ago
> Anyone have any idea why banks are so closed-minded regarding opening up their data via APIs? 1. The data has a lot of value, you need to convince your bank that having a great API is worth more than more rigid control of your interaction (more to them, not to you). 2. As you say, regulatory/legal stuff can be a nightmare. 3. Most first-world banks' internal systems are a bit of a maze given they've been built up over 40 or more years. Making them work safely and sanely with letting anyone code apps against interfaces is not particularly trivial.
kpil 12y ago
Any commercial bank that is not totally useless will be able to give you access to payments, transactions and account statements. There are standards for this, for instance ISO 20022 (xml based) or older protocols used in the SWIFT network. The banks will charge a fair amount for this though, and they will do it only for large customer and financial institutions. One reason is that it's one of the thing that they make money from in transactional banking. One other reason is that it's technically challenging, both for a customer and the bank to set up a secure message interchange, and there is no standard for authenticating the messages, or the sender.(That I know of, that's reasonably sane.) One other reason is that it's normally a lot of manual work to set up all this for a customer. It's also expensive to devlop a solution for this. There are a lot of systems that handles different things - ledgers, payment systems, message brokers, authorisation systems, the actual internet banking system, etc. In any case, it's more than one system and it's complex.
- kpil 12y ago
  That said; Fidor seems to have come a long way, and I know that other banks are also adding features like this to their internet banks. Most commercial customers tend to view the transactional part of a bank (payments, accounts) as an "it service provider" and not as a "bank", so things like this will absolutely come, also to USA that seems to be a bit old fashioned in regards to banking.

by zo1 12y ago

rodgerd 12y ago

> Anyone have any idea why banks are so closed-minded regarding opening up their data via APIs? 1. The data has a lot of value, you need to convince your bank that having a great API is worth more than more rigid control of your interaction (more to them, not to you). 2. As you say, regulatory/legal stuff can be a nightmare. 3. Most first-world banks' internal systems are a bit of a maze given they've been built up over 40 or more years. Making them work safely and sanely with letting anyone code apps against interfaces is not particularly trivial.

kpil 12y ago

Any commercial bank that is not totally useless will be able to give you access to payments, transactions and account statements. There are standards for this, for instance ISO 20022 (xml based) or older protocols used in the SWIFT network. The banks will charge a fair amount for this though, and they will do it only for large customer and financial institutions. One reason is that it's one of the thing that they make money from in transactional banking. One other reason is that it's technically challenging, both for a customer and the bank to set up a secure message interchange, and there is no standard for authenticating the messages, or the sender.(That I know of, that's reasonably sane.) One other reason is that it's normally a lot of manual work to set up all this for a customer. It's also expensive to devlop a solution for this. There are a lot of systems that handles different things - ledgers, payment systems, message brokers, authorisation systems, the actual internet banking system, etc. In any case, it's more than one system and it's complex.

kpil 12y ago
That said; Fidor seems to have come a long way, and I know that other banks are also adding features like this to their internet banks. Most commercial customers tend to view the transactional part of a bank (payments, accounts) as an "it service provider" and not as a "bank", so things like this will absolutely come, also to USA that seems to be a bit old fashioned in regards to banking.