Hacker News Reader

The problem is that for a lot of banks there is no easy way to automate that process. I think 90 percent of use cases would be addressed simply by providing a way of giving automated read only access to statements.

Instead giving access to EVERYTHING seems a little overdrive then....

Well, that was just an example for the sake of an analogy?

Obviously, I want a fully machine-readable API to all of my bank's functionality. Which also "downloading transaction data as CSV" does not fit at all if I have to manually log in and download the data. Also, CSV lists of transactions usually are useless for synchronization as they usually don't provide any mechanism to reliably deduplicate transactions and to check for completeness.

Does the history go back more than a year or two?

I would expect they are, if only for legal reasons.

According to my bank's website, I can get account statements up to 10 years back, except for closed accounts.