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Comment by jonahbenton | Hacker News Reader

Generally speaking, bank APIs are for use by businesses that want to be able to pull bank customer data. There are integration hoops and so forth. They are not for end user use.

Plaid has, or used to have, a mode where in preprod you could give it your credentials to a limited number of organizations and then pull in your data. Not sure that survived the Visa acquisition, but even if it did- personally implementing a Plaid integration gave me the willies. Handing over creds was in clear violation of bank terms of service. Plaid seemed to be playing fast and loose from a security perspective (IMO) and retained the right to keep your data even if you removed credentials. Was not comfortable.

Having implemented scrapers to pull my data- that option also painful.

OP is not wrong.

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> Generally speaking, bank APIs are for use by businesses that want to be able to pull bank customer data.

Generally speaking, yes, presumably because API access to checking and savings accounts is only applicable to businesses 99% of the time.

Most consumers, even programmers, don’t have a real need for API access to their accounts that isn’t already covered by simple CSVs or Plaid.

It's not about the format, it's about the access. I'd be fine with a CSV of my bank transactions, even the completely broken pseudo-CSV that my bank outputs. What I need is the ability to pull that CSV with an API call automatically, instead of having to log in to the bank (which takes almost a minute and involves retyping numbers from a mobile device), and navigate to the right place to find the CSV download (which takes another minute).

Basically, the bank UX sucks for my needs - and I'm guessing, for most people's needs[0]. Cynic in me says that the reason I can't get an API access is because somebody then would make an interface that doesn't suck, and the banks would lose the best place they can upsell people with financial products.

[0] - There's a reason why "preview your balance and last transaction" feature shows up in mobile banking apps these days.

The other thing you need is a transaction I'd. Transaction amounts can change over time. I got caught by this when I tried to build my own tracking tools. Credit card transactions in foreign currencies commonly change over time. My balances never added up and I couldn't figure out why. Turns out most banks support ofx. That has IDs so you can track the changes.

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