Comment by torbjorn
7 years ago
Mostly unrelated question related to banks, does anyone know of banks that expose an api that owners of consumer checking accounts can use? Specifically to do things like read balance and recent transactions. What banks make this easy and have good documentation?
In the UK, Monzo has a fairly good API for reading your account details, balance and transactions. It's 'private access only' (can only access your account) https://developers.monzo.com https://docs.monzo.com
+1 for Monzo. The API works with their business accounts (in preview), too.
Worth noting it's opened up to regulated AISPs now too, so it's no longer only available for consumers to use to access their own information.
Monzo has business accounts in preview? This is very relevant information for me... any idea how you can get in?
1 reply →
Banks have supported consumer-level API's since the 1990's. At first they were specific to Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money but now they have moved to OFX (Open Financial eXchange).
A partial list of banks that support OFX is here: https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settin....
For your own bank, look to see if they support import into Intuit Quicken or Microsoft Money. If they do, you can probably access the API directly yourself.
Note, you may have to pay a service fee to access the API. This will vary depending on the bank.
Check out plaid.com (I have no affiliation)
It’s an api service that integrates with most major banks.
Haven't looked at this one, but these things usually ask for and store your login details, and then simply scrape the bank's own online banking site to serve it up as an API.
Because what else can they do? They have the same access you do. Unless you don't give them it, which you shouldn't.
Plaid uses banking APIs. I know this because they once had a dispute with Capital One as they wouldn't update their API versions.