

Y Combinator And Yodlee Team Up To Give Startups Access To Financial Data - edw519
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/30/y-combinator-and-yodlee-team-up-to-give-startups-access-to-financial-data/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

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jgilliam
I'm starting to feel conflicted about these YC deals for priority API access.
Yodlee is notoriously expensive and not particularly developer friendly. It's
great YC is lessening that burden for their companies, but it's starting to
create a competitive advantage that undermines core hacker ethics.

What I'd like to see is YC working with the Yodlees of the world to make their
APIs more available to _all_ startups.

Don't turn YC into the next Harvard.

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mwerty
Why is it in YC's interest to do so?

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citricsquid
If _everyone_ has access more people will play around and/or be able to create
things. Having an idea and applying to YC with "I want API access" probably
won't work too well, even if they do "invest in people".

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sabon
Access to all those otherwise unavailable, expensive or hard to get data and
APIs seems to be the second biggest benefit of applying to YC. The first one
would of course be access to know-how and network of VCs.

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supahfly_remix
I use an online account aggregator with a large financial institution, which
uses Yodlee technology. Does this mean these startups have access to my
financial data? What financial data are they sharing?

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muerdeme
Does anyone know what this actually means? Yodlee seems to already have a beta
of their API available for developers
(<http://www.finappstore.com/howTo.html>). However, it's unclear whether they
charge for API access. Perhaps this is a price break for YC companies?

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JSig
I wonder the same thing. I was considering developing an app for the
finappstore but I just don't have time at the moment. Currently all apps
plugging into Yodlee must be built on the Adobe flex platform.

One interesting thing is that the developer forums on Yodlee site like pretty
desolate. Here is part of a message posted on 8-26-2010 which has zero
responses.

"There are almost 200 of you that have gone through the full developer
registration process and have access to building and testing applications
inside of Yodlee.

There are five applications that have gone through full certification and are
available in the Yodlee FinApp store in BETA with another six applications in
the process of certification right now.

The forum has been quiet with questions recently, so what are people working
on? What's blocking you from moving forward?"

I wonder if people just don't know about this or if the flex platform is
deterring developers. It seems pretty cool.

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d2viant
Although these are both turns off for someone using the API, I don't think
it's the empty forums or the flex platform that are deterring people. It's the
expensive pricing.

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alttab
I figured something like this would happen soon. Yodlee did it right. When I
was doing my own Googling for "bank account API" they quickly came to the
front.

This will give future finance-based YCombinator start ups a magnificent head
start.

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synnik
Please tell me that the headline is not accurate -- I hope that they gain
access to the APIs/tech, and not to any actual personal financial data.

I highly doubt mint.com's userbase really wants their banking data shared with
new startups.

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rossriley
Yodlee already provide a lot of backbone support for a lot of banking
institutions, they decided to also make a product out of this ability.

But you as an account owner have to allow access to each individual account,
what yodlee do is provide a way do use this account authorisation and pull
some or all transactions

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vaksel
this will probably make the next batch of YC applications more finance focused

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michaelfairley
Maybe YC W11 has some finance-oriented companies in it and YC's taking care of
business ahead of time. No doubt this would've been helpful to InDinero over
the summer.

