OpenBanking service that offers API?

Developers
1

(appreciate this is not specific to Monzo but I figured developers probs hang out here)

One of the things I thought open banking would bring would be to allow consumers to tap into their own banking data across all accounts/financial institutions, but it seems you need to go through a third party instead - which seems wrong to me as, as we know with MoneyDashboard et al. - the rug can be pulled at any moment as they go bust or change business models.

Does anyone know of a service that

  1. Aggregates all accounts from all banks who support OB
  2. Offers this as an API for you to ingest
  3. Doesn’t sell your data for marketing?
2

It’s been a while so I don’t know if it’s still possible but I was using Truelayer’s free testing account in the past to grab numbers from various accounts.

3

I use gocardless in combination with Actual

Although you could just use gocardless directly without the use of Actual.

https://bankaccountdata.gocardless.com/overview/

4

Stripe have entered this space. US only for now in public beta, but I’m involved in a beta for OB initiated payments in the UK, so except the rest to follow.

5

I’m shifting from moneydashboard - and it looks like moneyhub enables me to download transactions for all my linked accounts - but their API is only available to business customers :frowning:

So I’d still have to manually grab the transactions - but at least in one place. Its frustrating seeing the data in the monzo app but no ability to export or read with the API

6

I’ve started using GoCardless (nordigen) for this but there are a number of pitfalls

  • Starling works ok but the data doesn’t know about savings spaces/pots so any money coming out of pots just appears as a transaction on the main account, and you don’t see transfers in/out of pots.
  • Monzo works ok, I don’t use pots in monzo so I dunno if they behave the same as starling
  • Chase bank doesn’t work at all you just get an error when attempting to authorize
7

Update on the Chase Bank thing + GoCardless

It works but you need to do it in an awkward way

  1. Create the requisition
  2. Copy/make note of the the link (i.e. the https://ob.nordigen.com/psd2/start/<requisition-id>/CHASE_CHASGB2L)
  3. Open it the link on your mobile phone where the chase app is installed
  4. Go through the authorisation flow, this will open the Chase bank app and you can approve access

Now you can use the APIs to access your transactions :slight_smile:

1 Like
8

TrueLayer and Plaid spring to mind. I haven’t used TrueLayer myself, but I have played around with Plaid. You can use their Developer account, which is limited to 10 accounts, I believe (it was when I used it). You don’t need production access.