

Ask HN:APIs for banks/financial institutions? - sriramk

Investment sites like Covestor, Cake Financial or financial sites like Mint, Wesabe, Buxfer often have a 'import' feature where you can import your portfolio/account data from several institutions.<p>How would I go about getting at some of these APIs? Do I have to go through a 3rd party provider like Yodlee?
======
djb_hackernews
I have a lot of experience in this field. Lots of financial websites offer
data exports in a variety of formats (html, csv, tab, excel binary, ofx (the
format), qfx, xml, etc). Most times those exports are only available through
the web interface of the financial institution.

I worked on a system that gathered data from over 3000 FIs, and I can't
remember any of them having an API for data retrieval. (I don't include OFX).

OFX is a whole other beast, it's the protocol the Quicken software uses to
communicate with the banks. Often times the data coming out from OFX is
drastically different or outdated. Generally the OFX server addresses aren't
published publicly(strike this, it appears some people have made lists easy to
locate via google, though appears they are out of date...) and if they are
published at all they are in the documentation only accessible if you are
logged in. One trick is to download a Quicken trial version, and set up some
dummy accounts, and see where it tries to login to. Once you have the address
you then need the login credentials and an account identifier, which usually
isn't ever the same account id you'd expect. But OFX the protocol does have an
account discovery feature which is helpful.

My best guess is the import features are just importing the csv, tab, excel,
etc exports that many banks offer from their web interface.

~~~
sriramk
Interesting. Does the import feature screen scrape then (fill in credentials,
act 'as' the user'? Doesnt sound very scalable.

~~~
djb_hackernews
Ah, I guess I didn't understand the scenario. I assumed these services had an
option to import financial data via a file the user uploads. This gets around
the whole credentials thing.

When you provide these services your login credentials and account information
they are most certainly logging in via the web interface just as you would and
either downloading the exports themselves or screen scraping the html.

The system I was working on was time sensitive so we needed the most up to
date and complete data, and unfortunately this usually came in html form (idea
being customers rarely looked at the exports, and are quick to report
discrepencies in what they do look at which is always atleast the html page).

We had built a unified parser/normalizer/lexicon that could understand the
financial data from all of the FIs, we just had to download the pages. Which
isn't a hard problem and easily distributable.

------
masterj
Though I haven't looked into it very deeply, I saved this to my evernote
account a while ago, and I believe it my be what you're looking for.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange>

~~~
sriramk
True but what are the API endpoints? How does one actually get data out of
someone?

