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Where is the web service API for my bank account? March 27, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : web, xml , 11 comments

I happened to come across Dimewise (here’s their blog), yet-another-Ruby-on-Rails web app, this time for managing your personal finances. The folks behind it have built it to scratch their own itch for a lightweight web-based financial management tool. Ultimately it is going up against desktop software such as Microsoft Money, Intuit Quicken and the open source GNUcash. Its a great idea, one I’ve had myself in fact, but it suffers from two problems:

  1. Are people happy trusting the current state of their finances to an intermediary such as Dimewise, which would be perceived by the general public as having less available resources to maintain security compared to their own bank?
  2. The data entry required is tedious and theoretically unnecessary.

The last point is the killer for me. I really want my balances and transaction history to be automatically updated into such a service. The online interfaces of most banks these days provide an export function into CSV or the proprietary formats of the aforementioned desktop apps but I have to explicitly log in and perform the export. Why can’t I schedule it to be sent to a nominated email address on a daily basis? Why can’t I have a simple SOAP/REST API for read-only access to my bank account details? I appreciate there is a potential security exposure here but is it really any worse than if someone breaks into my letter box and steals the bank account statements out of it?

I am also aware that some banks (my own included) do offer a sort of portfolio management tool that will aggregate your account details across multiple banks/fund managers/telcos/loyalty schemes, etc, etc. The tool that I have available to me is ActiveX-based. Unfortunately that requires Internet Explorer (although IE Tab might come to the rescue) and Windows. Now there’s a highly secure framework! And it doesn’t help me in my efforts to move away from Windows to OS X.

Is anyone aware of any banks or other financial intermediaries (fund managers, etc) that are providing this sort of access for their retail customers? If there’s one in Australia I will strongly consider signing up! Consider this my feature #1 for any agile development teams working on online banking portals.

XML sux0rs January 19, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : development, xml , 1 comment so far

Whilst dealing with some XML and XML namespace issues today, I came up with the following motto that I thought was worth sharing…

If you want to dance to the XML tune, you have to pay the namespace piper.

If you are developing using XML, ignore namespaces at your peril!

My favourite XML quote is still the following;

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use XML.’ Now they have two problems. — dirtsimple.org