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Comment by terwint | Hacker News Reader

Very nice project. I think this is is in the step of the right direction for agent-driven assistance.

> How it works: you import a CSV from any bank, in any currency.

I think this is where you're going to lose people. If you're having to pull in data from multiple different sources, each with their own flow for exporting, I think this might be a non-starter for creating good financial habbit.

I recnetly had success integrating my local AI agent with Monarch money via an open source monarch MCP project. It took a bit of (AI) hacking the login stuff, but now I'm able to pull transactions, query patterns, have a daily report generated from hermes, etc. Much more technical that your target audience but possibly offers some inspiration.

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Appreciate the feedback. There's also a connected mode leveraging Plaid where transactions pass through servers memory and never stored. Outside the US, CSV is the only path for now otherwise agree CSV export is a chore for multi-bank users.

You could add support for something like simplefin.org, which provides an API for connecting to many different financial orgs. It is what I have been using for my local setup with Actual budget.

Thanks, will surely look into this.

Does your financial orgs actually support simplefin or are you using simplefin bridge?

Bridge is actually provided by mx.com, pretty much the same service as Plaid.

Actual budget is good. Connectivity in Australia sucks though so I've kludged my own approach (open banking connections to a single local aggregator then puppeteer to sign in and get an access token, then directly calling the aggregators internal APIs with it and pushing the data into a local Actual server using Actual's APIs).

A lot of banks make it easier to export PDF statements. I wonder if you could try adding the ability to extract transactions from a PDF. I've been working on something more limited (extracting just the account balance) with Qwen3 4B with decent success.

I've tried with some success but will spend more time on the input layer.

There’s similar support from many banks in many countries. But obviously will be a bunch of work to support them all.

It also requires you generally to trust some third party with your data.

Here’s an API one for Australia / New Zealand / USA: https://redbark.com/developers

Thanks, I was planning to add country integrations outside the US. Appreciate the pointer here.

I had great success using enablebanking.com for personal usage. The setup is a bit cumbersome, but works really well

Thanks, will surely give this a try. So far, I have US today with Canada, UK, AU, NZ and Europe on the roadmap.

"if you're having to pull in data from multiple different sources, each with their own flow for exporting"

you say this, but i got ChatGpt to just open chrome logged into two credit cards and a bank app and download everything with a certain criteria (i did this to populate items in a travel split app). So maybe it's not that bad

You trust anything run through a black box model to remain private? Laughable.

aren’t they all black box models?

tapping my credit card to buy things and generate the financial data in the first place was already trusting a bunch of black boxes anyway right?

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