Ah, HERE is the web service API for my bank account! July 13, 2007
Posted by James Webster in : web, finance , trackbackA long time ago I asked why my bank account did not have a web service API. I had come across Dimewise and thought it would be a great way to monitor my personal finances. The kicker was that it meant manually downloading my transaction history from my bank account and uploading it to Dimewise. Why can’t we just get a read-only API that allows us to download transaction history? Or why can we not have a machine-readable XML file emailed to us every week?
A few weeks later I came across Wesabe, best described as a Web 2.0 version of Quicken. They have some tools that automate downloading your transactions and uploading it to Wesabe, although these tools are at the mercy of the growing trend towards two-factor authentication on most internet banking websites. Alternatively Wesabe accepts CSV, OFX and other file upload formats commonly exported by banking websites. They take privacy very seriously having baked it into their architecture. Their tools use the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ to give you the option to clean up your transaction data and turn it into something useful (although I do find that the tools don’t really give me the fine control that I really need… Guys how about that regex or glob-based pattern matching approach that I requested?)
And just now, Wesabe have released an API. I am happy to see efforts to enable the banking public to get their financial data out of the roach motels that most banking websites are. Unfortunately now that I have moved back to the UK my current bank has NO transaction export capability whatsoever. Can anyone recommend a UK bank with a decent internet banking website that exports reasonable OFX data?!?!
Meanwhile I wonder if Scott Hanselman might convince Corillian to built a web service API into their banking platform?
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Hi James, you might want to check out what my friend Chris has been doing - he blogs here: http://blog.seagul.co.uk and is working his way through wesabe enabling all his accounts.
Heh. We (Corillian) has had a Web Services API into our platform since 2003. No bank has turned it on and made it public. We have both SOAP and POX (Plain Old XML) APIs. If you count OFX as a public web service API (which it is) we’ve had that since OFX came out, so like 2000-ish.
Anyway, check out the C# client I just did for Wesabe. They rock.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WesabeMakesFinancialDataAvailableProgrammatically.aspx
@Scott: Great to hear that there are vendors in the industry that are innovative… now if only your customers would catch up!
In the States I used MS Money extensively. It would automatically download 10+ different accounts, and keep them reconciled. I thought about using one of the Web 2.0 sites, and maybe when I moved back I’ll trying one of them out.
After a few years of using Money, it became a requirement for me that any financial institution that I was going to use had to have an API which Money could link into.
I was quite disappointed when the Australian Credit Card site I did had no interest in supporting an API, or even making the transactions downloadable. Had I been an employee, I probably would have just created the web service and not mentioned it to anyone. Seeing how we were using proper MVC, it would have been fairly trivial to swap out the html view with an OFX one.
@Brian: Yes, the attitude that Australian business sometimes has to opening access to data is frequently close minded. Look at the mess that the idea of an Australian electronic program guide has become.
OFX is a mess, but at least it is something. Of course it would be better if more banks supported it, and if they (their software) interpreted the specification very strictly.
I hear great things about Wesabe, but I prefer a desktop solution for my financials.