

Crawl Bank Accounts with the Ghost of Wesabe - abraham
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/02/crawl-your-bank-account-with-w.php

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there
screen scraping should only really be needed for banks that don't support
direct OFX access (or i suppose if your bank charges extra for direct access
and you don't want to pay it).

OFX is an XML'ish protocol that all of the big banks and major banking
software (MS Money, Quicken, Quickbooks, iBank, etc.) use to communicate when
downloading transactions, posting checks, doing transfers, etc. it's what i'm
using for downloading bank transactions in corduroy
(<http://corduroysite.com/>) and i have hundreds of banks listed in there.

if you know a bank's OFX URL, you can just send it an OFX query and download
transactions. it works the same for every bank and credit card company, and
it's much quicker than the screen-scraping dance of establishing a session,
logging in, clicking around, and then updating your scripts every time the
website updates its interface.

here are some common OFX servers:
[http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Setting...](http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settings)

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mattmiller
Does it work for bill paying? Cable, water, gas and electric, mortgage
companies? I think it would be awesome for have a way to pay all my bills from
one interface.

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ryanhuff
Most banks and credit unions have a (free) electronic bill pay integrated into
their online banking that allow you to pay bills to the kinds of companies
that you listed. The bank typically figures out whether to send them a
physical check, or handle it electronically.

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joezydeco
Man, just a simple twitter bot that hit me when a transaction was over a
certain amount, or perhaps over a certain distance away from home, would be
awesome.

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ryanhuff
This kind of feature is common in most banks that I have seen. Although
instead of Twitter, its email and SMS.

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joezydeco
Sure, my bank does it too. Finer-grained alerting could be useful, or possibly
aggregate tracking ("You've spent more than $50 at Starbucks this month!").
Location awareness would be the most useful fraud prevention tool.

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trotsky
Keep in mind you're only liable for the first $50 in fraud on a credit card.
In practice most US institutions will cover 100% of credit or electronic
banking losses.

On the flip side, any SAAS that monitored your bank transactions would likely
be more interested in developing and selling a profile of you than protecting
you.

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joezydeco
My idea was that the private,non-SAAS tool could track your total purchases on
a particular category (food, gas, restaurants), or even a specific store, and
inform you when you are blowing your budget. ("Hey, that latte put you over
for the month. Better cut back").

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loveatlonglast
Awesome. I'm at a startup now that could totally leverage this tech. Thanks!

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6ren
Does anyone know if something like this is available for Australian banks?

I'd love to automate telegraphic transfer payments ("wiring" the money). Just
need to poll for when the money arrives, and send out the receipt. Currently,
you have to check manually.

That said, telegraphic transfer payments often to involve a fair bit of
rigmarole, including negotiating prices, and even contractual terms in some
cases. So maybe automating that bit wouldn't make much difference. Still, it
would be great.

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Joakal
mint.com equivalent in Australia:
<http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1154397>

~~~
6ren
thanks!

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alanstorm
Half of me says awesome, while the other half is slightly-creeped-out that
scammers no longer need to stop at "nah, writing scraping scripts for bank
websites would be way too much work!".

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swombat
Any support for UK banks? Specifically, LLoydsTSB, whose online interface is
truly horrible... (and broken to boot)

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patrickk
According to this link, LLoydsTSB is in QIF format:

[http://www.accountz.com/accountz/online-bank-statement-
downl...](http://www.accountz.com/accountz/online-bank-statement-download)

A number of other UK banks there too.

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swombat
Yeah. Their export functionality requires logging out and in between reports
(apparently a "known bug" to be fixed in the "next release" which doesn't have
a set date to it). I was hoping there's a way to just point something at
Lloyds and have it suck out all the data for browsing outside of the
"LloydsTSB experience"...

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patrickk
Well you can try your hand at screen scraping your account using the Wesabe
script. Better than nothing. I've got a Bank of Ireland account and their
online banking is crap also. They don't even _have_ an export function, let
alone a buggy one!

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troyk
Awesome, was just getting ready to send in the yodlee NDA

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ithayer
you'll still need to send it. depending on the users you're supporting, and
how, yodlee supports the long tail (some better, some worse), which would be
difficult to support in a model like this.

