Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjackman | Hacker News Reader

Have you integrated this directly with the banks or do you take user's login details and scrape the online banking sites (like MoneyDashboard does)?

I would be more than willing to switch banks just to get a read-only API for this kind of thing, if only it was properly integrated (read: I don't have to give my login details to a third party)

View on HN

Teller uses the APIs used by the bank's own mobile app, i.e. they have been reverse-engineered. Whether Teller requires personal credentials is dependent on the bank's implementation. Barclays (integration temporarily unavailable), and Nationwide use EMV CAP (the card reader) for registration. If we can figure out a way to not take user credentials, we will always take that route.

I recommend Starling and Monzo if you want a read-only API for your own account, but if you want to build apps for 65 million customers they're not yet much use to you.

Cool, thanks for the info. It's such a shame we have to resort to (slightly) compromising on security & reliability to make banking work for consumers. Do you think there's a future where there's a standard API that banks expose for authorised apps to get at customer data?

I think you can use yodlee and it good for read only purpose.

Yodlee isn't read-only. They only expose a read-only API. Ordinarily you're giving them the credentials you use to login to online banking, therefore they notionally have the same access you do.

Yodlee is also beyond broken and is made available on very unfriendly terms, e.g. Pricing covered by NDAs complete with very significant setup fees, and minimum commitments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com