Hey @baconomatic, founder here - we do have a sandbox built in so that you can test your scripts/programs first before running letting it touch your real money :)
I wish brokerages/banks had APIs, even just for reading. I've tried just reading my Fidelity transactions with a script and they seem to have blocked my server.
You might check into the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange format. Software like Quicken is able to download transactions from several banks and brokerages using it. (I don't know what's involved in getting access to its endpoints, though.)
> Microsoft, Intuit and CheckFree announced the OFX standard on 16 January 1997.
> Many banks in the US let customers use personal financial management software to automatically download their bank statements in OFX format, but most Canadian,[2][3][4] United Kingdom and Australian (CBA exports OFX and QIF files) banks do not allow this.
I'm not criticizing - we need to do better! Developers demand JSON!!! :)
I'd like to have something like this for Germany. I am willing to pay 10€/month for a simple API access to my bank account. I need neither hosted code nor push. Just give me remote access for my scripts.
Probably I'm asking for the impossible because of the heavy regulation in Germany but just wanted to put it out there.
A friend of mine did this but after two times web access being disabled for his account because "suspicious activity" he stopped. Second time he actually tried very hard to simulate a human with delays, user-agent, browser capabilities and so on but didn't help.
This is getting harder and harder. Chrome allows you to do a .click but it also sends a tainted flag. I'm not sure if headless browses also send non-tainted events.
You can simulate a browser and act as if you're a normal, browser using customer. Encapsulate it and you've got an "API"; though it'll be a bit painful as a lot of banks' web backends are fucked up and you'll need to keep up to date with their changes, but still. I did it for my French bank account at one point (get balance + submit transfer).
Apparently, some used this technique for actual commercial services, which was partly motivation (they called it "screen scraping") for the European Commission's recent directive to require banks to allow authorized third-party access to customer account data.
N26 has got a quite decent REST API if you are willing to use your dev tools for a bit :)
Edit: Most banks also seem to support FinTS [0], but it seems a bit of a PITA.
Edit 2: figo might be worth a try as well, though I don't know their pricing.
Edit 3: bunq is quite nice as well. I implemented a few basic calls in node when they launched the API. Not the easiest API to work with, but acceptable.
It is quite good, but it's not perfect. The apps look non-native and the UI has many issues (e.g. entering 10 international characters quickly in the "transfer note" box pops up 10 "only latin characters" notifications), the login UI looks weird on Firefox, and http://my.n26.com/ causes an infinite loop that I reported weeks ago.
Other than that, I'm very satisfied with the service, and I use them as my bank bank, but I use Revolut (revolut.com) for my everyday transactions, just because it "feels" nicer. The transparent N26 card definitely turns heads, though, cashiers are always asking me about that.
If you watch to the end of the talk, you discover that N26 acted courteously and responsibly to the report, and all the security issues have been dealt with.
Thanks, nice list. Do you know of any aggregators in Germany that can provide a (read only) API for popular German online stock brokerage or pension fund accounts?
There used to be (still is?) an API called HBCI, but to my knowlegdge that required a smartcard (maybe not to bad an idea) and was mostly read-only. I think in the early 2000s you could use things like Quicken and MS Money to do homebanking (is this why some people in Germany still have the impression that it is dangerous and complicated?)
I think what "Sofortüberweisung.com" initially did was just to scrape the websites of all major banks, and use the HTML as an API. Then the banks found out they could not do much against it legally (and also fearing backlash because they had no good website-payment solution themselves), and they made some agreements.
It still is though it's recently called FinTS. Most german banks implement it and it's read/write usually.
Every bank has some specialities (even sometimes some bank branches have specialities) so it's usually not _that_ easy to implement if you want support for all banks.
"All" banks in Germany are run by less than 10 data centers. The second biggest, Fiducia, operates about 600 banks. This is one API for 600 banks.
For the API - almost all business accounts support HBCI or EBICS. For example my tax accountant and tax software have full access to my business account.
Hey @tarr11, founder here. We're trying to make banking more accessible to creators/developers so that they can build their own problem solving solutions :)
What about the Uber example? That's seem pretty cool.
But I think the problem it's attempting to solve is that without Root a bank must implement any kind of features that you may want, Root you allows you to implement any features you want.
Although I can't decide whether this is an amazing thing, or a terrible terrible thing.
> What about the Uber example? That's seem pretty cool.
edit: I didn't see the Uber example, so I was working off an incorrect premise. It actually makes sense.
How would that work in real life? Uber doesn't charge you before your ride is complete, and at that point your payment would bounce, and now you're in trouble.
Ditto for fast-food diet; nobody's going to be happy when you walk up to the counter at 16 Handles with your big bucket of ice cream and your card doesn't go through.
I suppose the idea is to keep all of this in mind, but it still seems odd.
But you're right - someone will come up with an interesting use case for it. (My first idea was a card for my kid, so they can only make $10 worth of in-game purchases a month.)
> How would that work in real life? Uber doesn't charge you before your ride is complete, and at that point your payment would bounce, and now you're in trouble.
Well in the Uber example you're allowing payments to Uber, not denying them.
But you do have a very good point about denying pay-after-use type transactions, I'm not really sure what they're doing about that.
> Uber card: Let’s say you give your daughter R500 pocket money each month, but you’re worried she might run out of money and be unable to afford an Uber home. So you write a little code and give her a Root card that a) gives her a limit of R500 per month, and b) lets her take as many Uber rides as she needs (enabling her to spend beyond the R500, but only for Uber)
That's the one I was thinking of, note the "lets her take as many Uber rides as she needs".
It doesn't technically solve a problem I have yet, but if more banks did it, it could.
I like to immediately take 10% of my pay check off the top for my savings account and investments. As a contractor, I also needed to take money out on my own for taxes. My hours are variable and I was getting paper checks.
Being able to just deposit my check and have a script run that automatically takes care of all of that would be great.
I can see the use being other for power users who want to have triggers for their own stuff "warn me if the cellphone bill is over the regular price so I check the overcharges". Myself if I go under my limit I have before the end of the day to correct the situation (I don't like to leave much money on the current account), so the first thing I would do is a simple script that warns me when that happens to avoid bank fees or even automatically correct if no correction had been done at 23h30.
Or for companies who would like a processing pipeline that treat customer's orders once their wire payment arrive (send a confirmation email, activate the product, ...).
Or of course like their snippet shows, for hip companies who want to post activities events on their social powered feed, because "bob bought bagels" is the information you need live at the office !
While I agree to some extent, if we ever want to get rid of welfare etc and move to a basic income for everyone one of the problems could be people mismanaging their basic income leading to people still starving or having other financial troubles.
Something like this API may make basic income more feasible if we could ensure that people aren't able to blow their budget and go hungry even with basic income.
Ability the decline transactions is my dream. Personally I want to approve every charge as it happens rather than have to scan my statements for anything unusual
I think it would be great for every purchase of mine to round up to the nearest $5 or $10 increment and transfer the difference into savings, or have it be percentage based, etc.
Having payments from clients automatically set-aside tax money would be great, too.
Because you have knowledge of your own patterns, because you can change technology much faster and test many things as opposed to banks that usually evaluate enterprise super expensive software, usually neglect open source and hence don't always have the best tools. If you think the integration as an individual you probably cant, but if it's a company building on top of something like this, then it's totally possible to be better than the issuers and processors.
Is that any harder than setting her up with her own account and a periodic transfer of $amountYouWishToRestrictHerSpendingTo money into said account? Both of these are available at any bank, methinks.
My BofA account has a whole spending habits section with graphics and charts and a ton of features, for free, which comes with my debit account. Why would I want to do all this myself?
The only real answer is privacy, but I would just use BTC instead of USD if I wanted privacy anyway, and BTC is already programmable.
Because this locks you into BoA. Hence why they're doing it.
If you have a BoA, Chase, Citi, and Fidelity account, then unless there's a push towards exposing data for third party uses your only option becomes trying to look at 4 dashboards.
To illustrate only one problem. There's also others, including portability: what can you take with you when you decide to switch your 10 year old BoA account to another bank?
I haven't used BofA for a while, but in general the problems I have with these features are
1) inaccurate classification and no way to fix it
2) exported data does not include all of this, so if I move banks or want to do analysis I'm sol
Yeah definitely. The classifications of transactions is generally poor. Even with Simple, which is very generous in allowing you to (re)assign arbitrary tags on the fly and provide nice data metrics, I'd still like to generate different graphs than they choose to present.
The ability to aggregate the data from all my accounts would be amazing...
Another would be that a third-party could write the code that performs the analysis, you should be able to just download (or purchase, I suppose) their script and use it, so you don't have to do it yourself anyway. This also means it becomes possible to have competition within this space, right now, you can only ever use your bank's analysis tools, if they're great, fine whatever good for you. But for some people it'll have limitations one way or another. Competition is not a bad thing.
Besides, it can be fun to look at your financial data with your programming tools. It's an interesting data set to play around with, analysis, data visualization, budgeting, even if just for learning.
Isn't this one of those things where if you're conscientious enough to want to spend time sorting this out and building up an analysis you're probably already the kind of person that doesn't have completely wild and untracked spending habits?
I don't think so; I'm a counter-example for one. I've found that I just can't track my spending unaided and that I pretty much need to maintain my own books to stay on top of everything.
If only every bank would provide a real time feed of every transaction, pretty much everything could be written as a third party software (except denying transactions, but if you use a credit card that's a non issue)
Useful new technologies don't always solve obvious problems. Sometimes a more fruitful way of thinking about them is to ask: what might this help enable? And especially considering this not just in terms of an isolated individual using it, but in terms of if it had broad uptake where lots of people were using it.
Think of things like the introduction of cars, or the internet. Their actual effect on most people weren't a matter of obvious problems they had at the time.
I really like this point. It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes". But bigger inventions don't solve a small, narrowly-defined problem: they totally change the game. You can't sum up the impact of the automobile, antiseptic or the internet in a sentence, because these inventions caused a cascade of other inventions that solve other problems.
Cars weren't released out of the blue by a well-funded startup as a half-baked MVP, they were built off of advances in industrial metallurgy, the invention of the engine, engineering used in trains and boats. Similarly, the internet didn't just happen - people first figured out electrical engineering, circuit boards, GUI's, COBOL and C++ and a myriad of other languages that made it possible to invent the internet.
I'm not saying that this online bank thingie is on that level yet. But for me, these kind of inventions are indicative of the death of institutional finance. The first step in destroying global finance as an institution is to whittle away at where the banks can make profit. Apps like Robin Hood have already helped to decentralize knowledge and participation in the stock market. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have shown at least a proof of concept that you don't need central banks to have currency. Money transfer apps like TransferWise eliminate currency conversion profiteering. Now what happens when you make a front-end that can wire all of these ideas together? A cashless society? Maybe.
> It's easy to say that "Slack solves the problem of centralized team communication" or "eBay and Etsy help everyday people collect money off their trinkets, crafts, or useless old clothes".
I would also say that if you'd told people about those problems thirty years ago, people might have responded 'but I can already communicate with my team using a conference call' and 'I can already sell items through the classified or flea market'. 'What new problems are these things solving?'
I think that most inventions don't do anything particularly new - the kinds of individual tasks you can do with them could have been done before. What they tend to do is provide greater efficiency. And greater efficiency at scale enables new kinds of things to happen.
E.g. think of youtube. It was possible for people to share videos before the internet. E.g. you could have submitted a description of your video to a printed catalogue, and if people wanted to watch it they'd contact you via the catalogue, so you could send them a copy on VHS. What youtube and the internet does is makes it so much easier -- so much more efficient -- that it makes it practical, and the scale enables all sorts of new things to crop up on top of it.
Generally people think something's "broken" when they commission an app like Slack - whether it's UX, speed, price point, poor efficiency broadly... I mean, hell, what new inventions aren't done in the name of efficiency? It's a motivating factor for almost everything people in business do. As such, this seems like splitting hairs to me.
A very common criticism of new things is that they don't do anything new. I'm saying that "mere efficiency improvements" matter more than is commonly thought by people encountering something new.
Hmm. I'll need to think about this one. I can see what you're saying... It's probably true but it definitely messes with my (and everyone's) tendency to see history as a series of monolithic happenings.
I would use it to do what my bank is apparently too stupid to do - email notifications of anomalous/suspicious activity and monthly spending summaries.
This is a huge (HUGE) marketplace ripe for innovation. Imagine having all your business transactions automatically pulled into your accounting system, ready for you to process and reconcile? You have (x) different bank accounts all integrated in real time, and you get realtime information.
Bank have been very very reluctant to open their systems via API access, which is why there are services like Yodlee. Basic charge is around $20k per annum plus pay per use. They are making a LOT of money, but the service is imperfect because they work by screen scraping the data from bank accounts. They have some direct integrations with banks, but my understanding is that the vast majority is still done via scraping. From end user perspective its terrible - you have to give them your login credentials, and supply OTP/2FA (if your bank uses this) every time you want to pull data in.
The banking industry is being dragged kicking and screaming to modernise and offer proper API access like this.
I wonder what could happen in the following circumstances. Multiple companies have such accounts. Perhaps whole industries. And the programmability was used for interactions between those parties. Automated systems, run by those companies, that shift money around between them for whatever purposes. Perhaps it could help automated business functions.
The kind of thing that I would like to be able to do is have a bunch of different virtual accounts that I can use for various different things. Pretty much the envelope spending system, but with cards.
I'd be able to take in paychecks and other income into a primary account, pay bills and distribute the rest into various accounts (for example, Eating out, Entertainment, Books, Learning, etc) according to some budget. Then I'd like to be able to see how much money I have left on any of these in pretty much real time.
Once you go up to the limit of one of these cards, then you know you've gone over budget. Half-way through the month, you have no more money for Entertainment? Too bad. I think this kind of thing would make it easier to practically stay within your budget.
Wanna go on a holiday? Boom, make a Holiday account, put a certain amount of money on it, and then you know you can spend that much on whatever, while everything else remains constant.
Holiday gift season? Make a budget, make a card, and spend from there, knowing that it's just a bigger hassle to use another card if you run out of gift money.
simple.com kinda-sorta had this idea, but without the denying transactions bit (and I kinda want the ability to set a goal that just gets money added to it every month, indefinitely, but that's not a feature :( )
Thanks! Founder here. Currently in private beta, but if you're with Santander, Nationwide, RBS, Natwest, Ulster Bank NI, or IOM Bank I can give you access - sg@teller.io.
Have you integrated this directly with the banks or do you take user's login details and scrape the online banking sites (like MoneyDashboard does)?
I would be more than willing to switch banks just to get a read-only API for this kind of thing, if only it was properly integrated (read: I don't have to give my login details to a third party)
Teller uses the APIs used by the bank's own mobile app, i.e. they have been reverse-engineered. Whether Teller requires personal credentials is dependent on the bank's implementation. Barclays (integration temporarily unavailable), and Nationwide use EMV CAP (the card reader) for registration. If we can figure out a way to not take user credentials, we will always take that route.
I recommend Starling and Monzo if you want a read-only API for your own account, but if you want to build apps for 65 million customers they're not yet much use to you.
Cool, thanks for the info. It's such a shame we have to resort to (slightly) compromising on security & reliability to make banking work for consumers. Do you think there's a future where there's a standard API that banks expose for authorised apps to get at customer data?
Yodlee isn't read-only. They only expose a read-only API. Ordinarily you're giving them the credentials you use to login to online banking, therefore they notionally have the same access you do.
Yodlee is also beyond broken and is made available on very unfriendly terms, e.g. Pricing covered by NDAs complete with very significant setup fees, and minimum commitments.
Barclays has already been integrated. We temporarily took the integration offline in good faith, pending commercial negotiations with them. Sadly, this seems like it was a ruse to buy themselves time to make changes to the app that break the integration. Their app is the most hardened app I've ever seen and it's challenging to reverse, but it's in progress. Don't worry, it will be back soon. :)
Using undocumented APIs that are able to be changed on a whim doesn't seem like something I would want to trust my finances too. This is not meant in a bad way it just seems a bit too risky for me to trust moving my money about with. I am glad you are doing something though, the state of banking access is atrocious.
PSD2 will raise awareness of APIs, but I expect what is delivered by banks to be disappointing. There are many reasons to suspect this all flowing from the reality that opening up access to the customer is in the exact opposite of their own best interests. Even if they act in good faith, which in my opinion they are generally speaking not, the design is by committee, with no users (account owners or developers) involved and their needs taking a back seat. This is the opposite to Teller's approach.
Forgive me for the naive question, but how does this stack up in terms of the legality of what you're doing? I'm aware of some limited exceptions that would allow you to do this sort of reverse engineering for interoperability reasons in the EU.
Also, isn't it going to be reasonably fragile? There's nothing stopping the banks (other than [in my experience] their general inability to make technical changes at a reasonable pace) pushing an update and breaking old API clients, right?
The legal one was looked at by lawyers earlier this year. There were two points to consider:
- copyright infringement via reverse engineering
- "hacking" statutes, e.g. Computer Misuse Act 1990
They concluded that there are no concerns in terms of copyright infringement, we have devised many non-infringing techniques for reverse-engineering and use them wherever possible, not least because they are easier to work with. When it is not possible to use such a technique this is where the exemption kicks in for creating inter-operable systems. FYI "infringement" occurs when transforming a low level language, e.g. machine code, into a high level representation. Computer programs are considered literary works, and their authors enjoy the full protection afforded as such.
The hacking statutes are very broad and technically if you used my laptop to access your own email while I was away in the bathroom you would fall foul of computer hacking laws in the UK. They said action via this angle said is a low risk (despite lawyers being conservative by nature). Teller isn't actually liable anyway, as it does not "cause" the access, the user does. Can a user accessing their own bank account ever be considered unauthorized? Would a bank prosecute their own customers for doing so? Unlikely, given Yodlee has been able to operate without legal challenge for decades now.
In terms of breakage, bank APIs rarely change. Most do not ever. The most aggressively defensive and technically competent bank IMO is Barclays and it takes them months to ship something to mess with me. They also can't just simply break something there is a window where both versions are supported where they advise users to upgrade before forcing the matter some releases down the line.
Thanks for taking the time to answer all that in so much detail, the legal aspect in particular is really interesting. Users staying on old versions is also a good point, and something I didn't consider.
Best of luck with the future of Teller, you're doing something that I personally think consumer banks should've been offering for years and it's great to see someone filling that gap. I'm hoping Monzo and others end up pushing "legacy" banks into opening up API access but I guess the realist in me finds this unlikely.
People asking about what problem this solves haven't been to South Africa or Zimbabwe which in some ways are ahead of the West in creating cashless societies.
The biggest bank is a phone operator and people can send each other money over the phone and from what I understand this is very common. Also interestingly most phones aren't smart phones. It's mostly analog. Banks have a serious incentive to create and encourage cashless societies -- because they're limited by the liquidity ratio.
People there are more skeptical of hard cash there while here it's nearly on par with Gold in terms of confidence.
I don't think I've to explain offering an API allows third party engagement and endorsement and an opportunity for others to grow their service. Yes there are security concerns but these can be all secured from backend.
One of the issue with cashless is that banks/financial service provided making money of of the money i.e. $100 making more than $100 with out adding any real value in fees (100 time circulation). I know time is money in most western countries but my place we do one crop a year and sit idle for 9 months. So time is not a money and we would rather give cash to a person get that much worth of a product.
E.g. My sons school charges 2% extra if i use credit card, Rs 20 if i use netbank and does not accept cash. So on a Saturday i am happy pay in cash when i have nothing else to do.
Unless government makes the transfer without fee (now they can print less money and that cost can be used for this infra of transfer), why is cashless better in the scenario where that saved time is not used for anything value generating?
Genuinely looking for answers to this that makes sense rather than saying time is money.
The example of your son's school is fine, but imagine that your son lives in another country. Cash has other problems beside being slow. It's insecure - a person could steal your $20 bill from your mailbox or his, or from the Post Office. It's untraceable - if your son's school says "We never got your payment" but your son swears he gave them the cash, you're stuck in a situation where either your son or the school is ripping you off (I'm sure your son would never do that). And last, it takes both time and money to convert cash to another currency. Taking the cash to somewhere where a person can convert it to the preferred currency is bad enough, and then it costs you money on top of it.
Feature of cash, not a bug. It's not the best choice for every situation, but neither is digital, which is why it's important that people have both options available.
Yeah, the ability to make payments outside of the scope of the panopticon is one of the better arguments in favor of cash and against a completely cashless society.
I'd like to think that in time someone will solve this too by some kind of clever obfuscation, but it's not going to be BoA doing it. It's going to be someone who wants to fuck with their status as a state-sponsored usurer. Or at least I hope.
Also consider Bitcoin as a "cashless society" alternative to the financial panopticon - no one's looking over your shoulder there and it's definitely not "cash".
I'm skeptical about Bitcoin as a potential alternative because I suspect that, if you combine the surveillance abilities of the state and the money of the state with the time and effort of the very many clever people who work for the state, Bitcoin will become substantially less anonymous.
If it's digital, it's traceable. If it passes through DARPA wires, or FCC waves, it's traceable. There are ways to obfuscate. But never completely like an 'air-gapped', transaction wherein I hand a cashier $5 in exchange for ice cream.
I'm clearly in the 'it's nobody's business except for the parties involved' party...
'Cashless' as in 'cash is illegal' terrifies me. It's nothing more than a force multiplier for the power brokers (banks, govs, etc.).
There will always be corruption, theft, etc. But in one scenario, anyone can do it. In another, only the third (one) party can do it. Tell me which is better, oh starry-eyed Valley dreamer?
You should be living in some other universe. Most of the corruption stems from the fact that cash transaction history can be spoofed easily. There is no way to link cash with your identity linked to the tax systems. With digital payment, all the payments to/from will be linked to a taxable entity.
True enough, but this wasn't in the context of taxes - it was about avoiding getting ripped of by paying cash then having an entity claim you never paid them. Receipts are still good for this - signed receipts even better.
Absolutely -- the police can be very corrupt in Zimbabwe so you don't want hard cash hanging around or it will be taken.
The actually official Zimbabwe currency can't really be taken seriously because of insane inflation rates.
US Dollars vary greatly in price. Small transaction fees are nothing to operate cashlessly for some of these people compare to the risk of trying to store cash.
Even India recently banned high denomination notes because they were so associated with drugs and illegal behaviour.
Actual Zimbabwean here: you are so wrong I'll have to ask: have you ever been to Zimbabwe?
> Absolutely -- the police can be very corrupt in Zimbabwe so you don't want hard cash hanging around or it will be taken.
Yes, the police are corrupt but they won't rob you[1], they might try and coerce a bribe.
> The actually official Zimbabwe currency can't really be taken seriously because of insane inflation rates.
This is wrong. It has been wrong for close to a decade because Zimbabwe "demonetized" its currency (Zimbabwean dollar) in 2008 after an infamous bout of hyperinflation - you might have seen/heard of the 100 Trillion dollar note.
1. Unless you have been incapacitated by a traffic accident. A worrying trend has emerged in recent years where passers-by or attending police go through the car and belongings of dead/dying accident victims. See http://www.chronicle.co.zw/chiriseri-corpse-robber-cop-dies-...
Is there really much practical difference between a police officer demanding a bribe and being robbed?
(I've never been to Zimbabwe: if there is a difference between cops "coercing" a bribe and what I'm assuming you mean I'd appreciate the clarification!)
> Is there really much practical difference between a police officer demanding a bribe and being robbed?
Yes: you can say no to coercion but you have no choice when you are being robbed.
Violence (or the threat of it) is a hallmark of robbery: Zimbabwean police will not do that at traffic stops - they are usually not armed. They will, however threaten to impound your vehicle for minor infractions (which would be illegal in most cases) and/or threaten to jail you to wait for your court date. Either of these situations will require paperwork and the money goes to the state and not their pockets, so they make you wait and reconsider the bribe, but eventually let you go. Usually.
Also, in the context of this thread, having cash or money in the bank makes no difference because traffic stops now have portable card machines for "spot fines"!
There's lots of people from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique etc. who come to South Africa because they can make more money here. Then they send the money back home. But if they send cash back it gets stolen 90% of the time. If they transfer the money it from one bank account to another, they don't lose their money.
Making transactions more customizeable/automated is a great advantage. Why would you not want that? Also, this just came out, so it remains to be seen what long term effects it may have.
> Making transactions more customizeable/automated is a great advantage. Why would you not want that? Also, this just came out, so it remains to be seen what long term effects it may have.
> Then they send the money back home. But if they send cash back it gets stolen 90% of the time. If they transfer the money it from one bank account to another, they don't lose their money.
Making transactions more customizeable/
WTF are you talking about? No one[1] uses bank transfers to send money to their families in the SADC region: it's quicker and cheaper to use formal and informal money transfer agencies where the recipient gets cash, which is not stolen "90% of the time".
I swear HN seems knowledgeable on all subjects except those I am deeply familiar with...
1. SWIFT transfers do get used for big transactions or paying corporations, but no one I know will be sending amounts less than monthly income this way
When I said, "transfer the money from one bank account to another", I actually meant not sending the money physically, but by using various other means. I didn't know how to word this, and it came out wrong.
And I was talking about the cash being stolen 90% of the time, if you do choose to physically carry it with you back home. (Or trust someone else to do it)
> And I was talking about the cash being stolen 90% of the time, if you do choose to physically carry it with you back home. (Or trust someone else to do it)
This is also not true. 17,000 Zimbabweans[1] travel into South Africa daily by road, most are destined for Musina (nearest South African town to the border) where they buy goods with cash[2]. If theft rate is 90%, that would result in 15,300 cases of theft per day (5.5 million per year) which (a) just can't go unreported, even if you think Zimbabwe is some undeveloped backwater and (b) where do I sign up to join this very effective Thieves Guild? It has to be well-paying.
Let me counter with these facts about banking in South Africa:
1. Fees at most banks are high. (A basic account with no transactions typically have fees of several dollar per month).
2. If people are moving away from physical cash, its because of security concerns (theft and robbery), not liquidity.
3. Most transactions are done by credit card, debit order or Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT). EFTs are done between numbered banks account. Mobile to mobile phone transfers are still very rare.
4. People are stubornly loyal to their banks. If root fails, it will be cause of this.
Just to clarify #2 - I read that as meaning that liquidity is a reason for banks to like the move away from physical cash. Why customers like it is clearly security, though, you're right.
Regarding # 4. This product is by one the current largest banks in South Africa. Standard Bank of South Africa is big in S.A and operates in many other African countries.
I would say that a lot of countries in EU are ahead of US in eliminating cash as well (wether this is good or bad can be discussed). The new EU Payment Service Directive 2 (PSD2) will essentially force EU banks to open apis for account information and payments to third parties.
Ahem, ahead of the US, really. Canada and the EU can be cashless already, with chip cards and direct bank withdrawal at the POS a reality for 99.99% of merchants.
China is cashless. Stores don't accept your cash much. And you have to show a government id to buy anything. And they track you.
But it gets worse than that. If the government wants to punish you, they can just cut you off. Can't buy food, can't pay rent.
Oh you think your friends can help you? China has that covered too, with its shiny new credit system. Being associated with - let alone helping - people cut off from buying food may result in a drastic lowering of score and ability to do business yourself.
On the bright side, used wisely such coersion may he better than outright violence at stopping criminals and terrorists.
Thankfully, there is a good amount of space between money under mattresses and a government controlled economy. Your comment is a giant straw man. Canadian and EU systems are private ones and the government has little or no power to directly intervene, short of law enforcement.
The idea that eliminating paper is some sort of boogeyman from Revelations is about as silly as the idea that holding on to your Glock allows you defend your rights against a corrupt government. Neither actually offer any type of protection against these particular issues.
Unless you are wandering around with $20K in cash everyday, your bank account is still subject to the very things you seem to be afraid of. The only thing that changes in a mostly cashless society is your access to your bank account. If the government is going to freeze your account, it matters little if you have a chip card or need to go to the teller.
Thankfully, we in the west have moved most of the management of this to the private sector, and require things like warrants before any real action is done. That can and is an issue at times, but has little effect on the day to day implementation of one method over another.
I'm not sure what you are looking for. OP linked a cashless society to being the cause of government control. This is false. Government can exert control already in a cash-based society to a sufficient degree. It's more a style of the government in question than the tech used.
You missed the part where I said a government id is required to make a purchase, so there is a single point of failure aka disconnection. This is not true in the USA or other countries where you can have cards from many different banks so if one blocks you, you pay with another. And cash certainly represents a way of paying with no such restrictions.
Sadly, I think the solution in the US and some parts of the EU is even worse than the chinese one.
Try buying Cuban cigars without cash anywhere. Your VISA or MasterCard will mysteriously fail to allow this purchase – because, due to the embargo, these companies just refuse to allow transactions containing the words "cuba", "iran", etc.
VISA and MasterCard also have additional rules of their own, and if you have a society that is cashless, they can just cut you off, too.
This is giving a for-profit entity (which, by its own nature, does not care about you, just about taking your money) far too much power.
Sweden is having that problem: You can’t do anything without a debit card anymore, banks have high fees just to get cash from your account, but the only debit cards you can get are from VISA or MasterCard.
This wouldn’t be an issue if there were many competitors, or even local competitors, or if the systems were open.
I'm Canadian, so not only can I buy Cuban cigars, I can buy them in a store down the street with my debit card. (A real debit card that connects directly to my account, not just a prepaid credit card.) Regardless though, making an illegal purchase isn't a very good reason to argue for cash; in fact you may have more luck changing the dumb laws if people are truly hurt by them.
The US definition of a "debit card" is massively different than the Canadian one. For us, our bank card is the debit card. The same one I use to take money out of my account at an ATM is the same one I can use to buy a $1 coffee.
Why some banks do charge outrageous fees, thanks to the free market there is a healthy market and many banks in Canada are now fully virtual or offer next to no fees.
Just because a system is poorly designed in one locale does not mean the idea itself is flawed, just that it should be implemented in an improved way.
Given that I've personally bought Cuban cigars with my Amex card last Christmas as gifts, I'm pretty sure your assertion is false.
It's more likely the case that an American credit card holder cannot buy them, even when he is in Germany, because he's subject to American laws, as I would be if I took a box into the US and started selling them.
It went so far that PayPal, VISA and MasterCard ended up threatening several German store chains to stop selling products from Cuba or they’d end all business with the store
Rossmann won against PayPal in court, to this date they don’t offer any payment via PayPal.
They came to an agreement with VISA and MasterCard, where if a sale contains embargoed products, everything but these products can be paid by card, but the embargoed products can not.
> The US definition of a "debit card" is massively different than the Canadian one. For us, our bank card is the debit card. The same one I use to take money out of my account at an ATM is the same one I can use to buy a $1 coffee.
I keep seeing this pop up, but it's a misconception; we have these in the US too. I have one, although I don't use it for purchases (I use a rewards credit card that gets paid off monthly instead). Here's an example (hopefully Wells Fargo doesn't redirect you because you're in Canada): https://welcome.wf.com/checking/?gclid=CIzL2ong1NMCFVBtfgodb...
It's not that they don't exist, it's that you don't have the POS being widespread enough to support it in a common way.
The Interac system in Canada is pretty much a given for any vendor that has a cash register. That automatically makes every single bank card into a direct debit card. You can choose to use it if you want of course, but it's default for all bank accounts, really.
This is still very wrong. US debit cards work with any credit card-accepting POS. If you can enter 16 digits and expiration date and get a charge, your debit card will deduct that amount from your checking account for you.
> many banks in Canada are now fully virtual or offer next to no fees.
Uhh, which ones? Free chequing accounts have transaction fees for Interac, and with unlimited Interac accounts you pay monthly or must keep a minimum balance. I'm sure there are a couple exceptions, but certainly not with TD, CIBC, NBC, etc.
Check out credit unions. I'm with Coast Capital and pay zero for fees at regular bank machines. "Private" atm fees do cost, yes. Tangerine and PC financial also offer no fee options too, but I'm not sure to what extent.
Wait, is China really cashless now? A coworker of mine was just telling me that he used go with the accountant at his workplace to withdraw millions of dollars in cash from the bank to pay all the employees in cash. He hasn't worked in China for at least over 10 years but I didn't expect a change from million dollar cash transactions being commonplace to cashless in that time.
I dont think he knows what he is talking about. I spent 3 weeks in China in February, and used cash for pretty much everything including accommodation. Admittedly, there are lots of options for paying for things with wechat, etc. but it was nowhere near cashless.
That's not accurate. I was just in Chengdu and Shenzhen last month and paid almost exclusively in cash everywhere I went. In fact for smaller vendors and street food, cash is the only option. Many vendors also accept WeChat payments (which seems to be the most common form of payment, at least for casual to mid-range transactions by people in my peer group), and UnionPay network credit cards are also widely accepted. Western credit/debit cards tend to work only at more upscale/modern/larger vendors. From what I've seen of Chinese commerce in various cities, I would be very very surprised if China went anywhere near cashless anytime soon. Cash seems to be a bigger part of the culture there than in the USA.
You do have to show government ID to get a cell phone or purchase long-distance train tickets. Also checking into a higher end hotel. And since using public Wi-Fi requires you to authenticate with your Chinese phone number, that's also effectively linked to your ID. There are many aspects of Chinese society that are easily trackable by the government, but commerce does not seem to be one of them, at least from what I've seen.
China is nowhere near cashless. Though, they do do a lot of payments by mobile apps like Alipay and WeChat. I was there for 3 months recently and I used Alipay for almost every cos Im from NZ and whilst we have cash here I never use it, every transaction is done via debit card. Was so good when I got Alipay in China cos I hate cash. Still... China definitely isnt cashless.
ok - everything you just said (save the last line) is wrong. I have lived in china (wuhan, specifically) for about 4 years and have been to beijing, shanghai, and a few random smaller towns/cities. while it is possible to use various mobile payment networks almost everywhere, literally everywhere also accepts cash. literally nowhere requires that you show any sort of ID to buy physical goods under any circumstances. buying internet/phone service does require an ID, and thus the govt can fuck with you there if they want, but rent is often done informally so no chance of interference there. the market here is so filled with tiny businesses that even if a person were somehow banned from buying at larger stores (which doesn't happen), they would still be able to get everything from smaller markets at a similar or sometimes lower price.
the social credit system you are talking about isn't actually in effect yet. once it is? yeah, it'll be pretty fucked up. I suspect it will get thrown out or heavily modified before then. but again - it will hold no power over people who use cash at small markets.
I'm not trying to defend the government here, but please have your facts straight so as to prevent you from spouting nonsense like the post above. criticism is most effective when it is accurate.
Acknowledge that not using cash places is "advanced" but also want to say that being able to use cash is not necessarily a bad thing. Cash allows for anonymity, allows for the un-banked to conduct their business, and prevents 100% leverage of your transactions data (not to mention transaction fees) by the companies that handle them.
You are correct in all of this, of course, but cash can always be kept for backup even in societies that are mostly cashless.
The issue of "un banked" can be distinctly American too, actually. Given the extent of social programs in Can/EU, even the nearly homeless have bank accounts, because government funds are pushed directly into accounts, and it's more secure/timely than receiving a physical cheque. Not having a simply checking account is a very rare thing in Canada.
I believe you're referring to Kenya and Ghana instead. It's called mobile money and the Telcos are actually taking a huge bite out of the banking market share
The rules can be as complex as the code you can write. It effectively sends a webhook on which you can respond "decline" to stop the tx from succeeding. (RootCode also packages this concept to make it quicker to prototype)
Is there a timeout for approving/declining transactions? I'd be interested in setting up a sort of 2FA for large/over budget transactions where I'd have to manually approve it before it goes through.
e.g. "You've already spent over your monthly Amazon budget by X amount, are you sure you want to make this $200 purchase?"
As an extension to customizing your bank account. It'd be nice to be able to pull funds from cryptocoin accounts or make calls to smart contracts, etc. I'm thinking this could be the IFTTT of bank accounts, so I want to see as many connections as possible.
Well that makes sense, but not what I would call "backing it". I think the terminology confused me, integrating other accounts, etc. is a clearer target.
One beta user built a script that sells bitcoin in real-time as he swipes his card and tops up his fiat account, effectively making his card "spend bitcoin" :)
As far as the US IRS is concerned, every time he makes a purchase with bitcoin, it is a taxable event where he must declare any gains/loss from the time he purchased the bitcoin. This type of regulation is hindering BTC adoption in the US. BTC also doesn't solve any problems the average person has in a developed country, but that is another story..
There is essentially no point to using a blockchain if the only thing you're putting on it is an accounting system you have absolute control over anyway.
I think tech people vulnerable to buzzwordism have an instinctive response to respond to any mention of money with "blockchain!", even though it's really only useful in this context for decentralized payment systems (i.e. not for banks). The only place banks might want to use blockchains is for low-trust inter-bank settlement.
"Absolute control" would imply I can import javascript modules and interface with blockchains directly, so you're right that it wouldn't be Root's job to utilize the blockchain if I have this ability. There is nothing to indicate this is the case, however.
edit: if it is the case, I would be excited to see some docs
I'm assuming you're talking about RootCode? It's in a different secure environment (detached from our other systems) and unique to each user. The execution time is limited by the POS (point of sale) devices and varies
If I could incorporate, programmatically transfer money into a business account with as little friction or pain as possible, that would be helpful. I could then programmatically say, If billy's video got 5 likes, then transfer $50 to his account, etc... Seems like it could be a nice tool for a small digital business.
I haven't seen any stack information yet (although I haven't checked the slack channel) what technologies are involved and how do you plan on mitigating the mass loads?
- for the stack was there specific criteria why certain languages where chosen in your use cases?
are there any API rate limits for clients?
are there any current plans on mitigating DDOS or other malicious attacks?
2016 has been a hard year for banks and hacking specifically the story about Bangladesh. The trend seems that this will become more likely as we move towards a full online infrastructure. For banking this is another layer where vulnerabilities can come up are there are plans in place for this?
> 2016 has been a hard year for banks and hacking specifically the story about Bangladesh. The trend seems that this will become more likely as we move towards a full online infrastructure. For banking this is another layer where vulnerabilities can come up are there are plans in place for this?
I'm not affiliated with Root, but the bank they are partnering with (Standard Bank of South Africa) was also hacked in 2016 and defrauded of R300 million ($16 million) via withdrawals from ATMs in Japan[1]. I'm sure they are acutely aware of the need for security.
Hey - I previously worked on a prepaid debit platform that worked slightly farther from the metal here (post-processor).
I'm interested in two pieces of data we couldn't get there, but that I had really high hopes for.
1) Dynamic merchant-type filtering before auth. For example, if tom has spent 50$ on food this month, all merchants that identify as "food" will fail auth on further transaction attempts. I'm not sure if these are still called MCCs outside of the US, or "merchant codes".
2) Level 3/line item receipt data. For example, instead of showing I spent 5.00 at QuikEMart, it shows 2.50 on soda, 2.00 candy bar, 0.50 tax.
Will your platform offer that level of control/visibility?
Your page shows a sample bit of code (the beforeTransaction function) that approves a transaction. Does MasterCard (or whoever) still run their approval magic before that?
I think parent is referring to 3-D Secure (3DS). This is basically an authentication step which delegates most of its implementation to your bank (or whoever your credit card provider is).
I'm not sure what Standard Bank is doing with regards to 3DS, but it would certainly be neat if its implementation were programmable as well.
How far inside the bank do you APIs go? Do they deploy code you wrote or how are they providing the access? Did you build on top of some raw APIs? The hardest part of this businesses is probably that connection with the bank and I'm curious about what info you can share regarding that.
- Do you have programmable international wire transfers in the works? That would be an instant sell to me. My current bank requires me to show up in person, and then verify the transfer by phone, both of which require making time out of a busy schedule.
- Do you have programmable virtual credit card numbers?
- Have you considered virtual bank account numbers as well? For example, I have had issues with organizations continuing to deduct from my account via ACH after stopping service. If I had a virtual bank account number that could be deleted, those rascals could be stopped in their tracks the moment I make the call saying "you are no longer authorized to deduct from my account". With the current system banks still let the unauthorized ACH transactions slide.
> Do you have programmable international wire transfers in the works?
Unless things have changed recently, please watch out for the money laundering laws if you are in the USA. It is easier than you might think for absolutely innocent people to fall foul of them, making life miserable (speaking from experience).
First, good luck - it's a difficult space and I applaud you for trying something different. I have a few uncorrelated questions:
1) Is the API limited to types of transactions or do you host configuration information? For example, I've often wished for a bank account that would look at my outgoings and some criteria that I've set, and then allocate some monies to savings or investments on a percentage basis rather than an absolute number. Are those calculations something I'd need to do at my end and then send you a bunch of API calls to make the transaction, or would they run as bots on your server? Sorry if that's not very clear
2) Will you impose tight or narrow restrictions on who can open accounts? For example in the USA many banks require an SSN to open an account and won't accept an ITIN (another kind of tax ID sometimes issued to immigrants), placing millions of people outside the banking system and thus making it that much more difficult for them to pay bills etc.
3) Will your service have access to the SWIFT network for international transfers or are you subject to restrictions while you prove some sort of banking bona fides? I don't know anything about banking relationships in South Africa or so but I've noticed the US is very aggressive about limiting transaction access for anything that looks like it could be remotely connected to crime of any kind, and I have sometimes had the impression that US banks are very 'suspicious' of anything that might coincidentally pose a threat to their business model.
I want to wish you a lot of luck and am very excited to see where this might go. I've never enjoyed dealing with money or finance, and get no more enjoyment out of being paid than I do out of paying bills. Financial chores are about as much fun as cleaning a toilet and the idea of being able to reduce the amount of time spent on dealing with money without putting myself at financial risk sounds heavenly.
(1) A mixture of the two. We do allow you to write code that we host for you, to make prototyping (or building small features) easier and quicker, and you can access it all through the API, so you could do everything through a few https calls. (All account transactions are available to you)
(2) We try our best to make everything as seamless as possible, but we still have to comply with local regulations. We're working hard to create the best user experience possible given the tightly controlled environment we're in.
so i'm in line behind someone paying with one of these cards, and i'm supposed to wait while gary pulls out his phone on the toilet and clicks the button to approve the transaction???
Random question but it really bugs me that FNB and I think most other South African banks still use SMS/Email based secondary authentication OTPs. Are you guys planning on using TOTP by any chance?
Really? That's great. I didn't know that. FNB should get on it then. In general FNB seems to have 'poor' security. You can't even paste a password in when resetting or signing up. They seem to just want me to be making week passwords.
Hi RangerScience, the APIs are based on REST, so any language that can handle https are supported. We're also working on libraries for a bunch of popular languages :)
I would like to volunteer writing binding for as many languages as you can come up with, but I can't guarantee I won't shave off a fraction of a cent in transactions. Or that I'll get the decimal placement right when dealing with that "fraction"...
In all seriousness, I would be fairly worried running someone else's code on my bank account unless it was very straightforward. Even forgoing malice and incompetence, there's plenty of "wow, that's a crazy interaction between systems that wasn't obvious" to go around.
As another person suggested on this thread, I want to program my own fraudulent activity check. E.g. if someone buys something x miles from where I live.
As another person suggested on this thread, I want to program my own fraudulent activity check. E.g. if someone buys something x miles from where I live.
Planning on going for corporate cards first? They'd eat this up -- directly enforce expense rules at the card. Maybe look for a buyout by concur :-)
Separately, looking to make this a platform for other vendors to issue cards? E.g., so another company can add logic for say, a teenager's card that the parents manage, and use your platform for this?
Shoutout from Canada! There are 32M of us, 88% of whom have internet. Our banks are archaic and expensive, and as a people, we have a low tolerance for that. My current bank actually believes that the telephony system is secure, compared to email :/
Our banking laws are favorable to startups; I could start my own bank, if I wanted to, for little more than the cost of a business license. Many merchants run their own little micro-banks, partly because of the aforementioned problem. Please help :)
As someone who doesn't want to share my creds with Mint or rummage through GNU Cash to write my own solution, this looks like a great idea. I'd love to build a consolidated dashboard for my networth with APIs like this.
As someone who works at a credit card company Transaction data usually doesn't look that clean. But this is a cool concept, looking forward to ideas that are implemented!
I mean, I did and I got a lot of money from betting on that. I'm post exit on precisely that bet, and were I not so incredibly tired of fintech I'd bet again.
Many national American banks are toxically opposed to actual modernization, for a variety of reasons. Their classical "enterprise" beliefs on security put all the banks I've talked to well behind the curve.
But also, I want to avoid a scenario where the US is a principle innovator in technology and also in finance.
Not entirely sure why you were downvoted. American banks are pretty horrible from a technology point of view. I've dealt with a couple of US banks, and they're still very much stuck in the "paper cheque"-era, with no desire to do anything about it.
see: that article from a few weeks ago chronicling that guy's 10 year journey exposing a serious bug in his bank's website where no CSRF is implemented.
spoiler: it still exists, and their solution was to have him sign his soul away and shut up about it.
When can I have direct control of recurring payments? I want to be able to "push" money instead of having it "pulled" from my account.
This is a totally reasonable feature. If a merchant wants assurance that they will be paid, they should charge a deposit.
The closest I've had is Entropay, but I don't really trust them for large payments.
Recurring payments are so abused, I can't count how many times I have been mislead. And there is a strong financial incentive to mislead people. And having to contact my credit card company after the fact is not good enough.
In my experience, this is only the case if you set up the payment through the bank's automatic payment system, which typically uses paper checks (but may do an electronic deposit for some payees who have specially registered).
Most subscription-based businesses that go to your bank account get an authorization to do an "ACH pull". In some instances, this authorization alone can act as collateral (e.g., in securing payday loans or medical payment agreements). As such, I would assume that allowing consumers to revoke the authorization is more problematic than it sounds.
Hey (founder of Root here), our platform gives you full API access to, for instance, do any of the things you do on the normal banking interface through code - like initiating a transfer to someone else, or building your own recurring payments system using a simple cron job :)
I would love to be able to script my bank. Chase.com is an ongoing battle. There are plenty of projects to automate banking, but it's an uphill battle.
I'm sure if I had a business account, I'd have more access than what the browser gives me.
I would love to be able to do things like, see what payments are flagged as recurring, and group them together, and sum them.
I believe what apostacy meant was the ability to prevent a recurring payment from occurring without approval. I may have misunderstood what they meant but something along the lines of: a debit shows up in your account as pending, and you have X amount of time to approve or decline it. That way you are preventing a debit from even occurring in the first place, rather than having to fight your bank to get the money back.
What I basically want, is to have more control. I want a similar amount of control as to what I have with paper money, or even virtual in game currencies.
Right now, the scale is not tipped in my favor. I would be happy to pay for it.
I understand that banks have reasons for things to be arraigned the way they are.
I would love to have a "personal firewall" level of control over my money. I'd like to see that Widget of the month club is requesting $50, and I can confirm/deny it.
I only signed up for a widget of the month because it seemed like a good idea, but they deceived me into thinking I could back out at any time, and then when I cancelled my account, they just "paused" it for three months.
We don't use the "banking" model for other resources that are supposed to be our property. An app on my phone isn't supposed to be able to delete my photos, and the accepted solution is not that I call some external entity to undelete them. I know that these examples are very different, but that is what I would like.
I can also simply block someone from contacting me if I want, without having to justify it to my isp. I want to be able to do that with my money. If someone disagrees with me doing this, and thinks I still owe them money, they can be free to sue me, or do some other sanctions.
Right now, I create virtual credit cards and only fund them enough to pay my recurring payments. I want to automate it.
95% of the time, recurring payments that fail for me are done in bad faith, and these actors will not make a fuss if they can't process their payments.
I know this is probably a pipe dream, and that there are already system I can use, and that our financial system is set up the way it is for reasons. But that's a pain point for me, and a lot of people. People would like to be empowered, and feel that they have control. I think, in the end, things won't really change. Most people will still pay legitimate charges.
This screenshot from the front page seems to be offering something like what you want? [1] And they clearly support virtual cards so why wouldn't automating that work through their API? [2]
True, although I wonder whether the transaction can be asynchronous. For example, if you don't approve or deny within a few seconds, I'd be willing to bet that the transaction times out.
This would be fine for in-person transactions, where you can approve it on your phone, but for transactions you aren't expecting (e.g. recurring monthly subscriptions) it seems like you'd need some notice -- or a long timeout period.
I'd love to collapse all of my recurring payments into a monthly report, that I can review and authorize. This is exactly the thing banks are suited to handle.
It would also be cool if a bank could abstract bill payments for me, where they present the debit, and show the time window to pay it, and let me select what business day to process it on.
Actually, all of these services exist in one form or another. If you have a business account. And most banks have bill payment processing. But I'm surprised that no bank is offering these services bundled together, directly to consumers. I'd happily pay for a checking account console.
> I'd love to collapse all of my recurring payments into a monthly report, that I can review and authorize.
Yes, even just a list of the recurring payments (that is updated in realtime and that you can centrally discontinue) should be available to the banking consumer -- and it should be the responsibility of the banking entity to provide this feature.
The do not, because the financial sector makes its revenue from payments occurring, rather than not. A consumer would naturally gravitate towards a bank that was not limited by this concern (or derived equivalent profit elsewhere for provision of value)
What I've found, is that every virtual credit card provider has to try to process recurring payments, even if that virtual credit card is depleted, kind of defeating a big use of virtual credit cards. I am sure that this is something they were obligated to do by other financial institutions. So virtual credit cards just end up being solely for online transactions that are not recurring.
The only company I have found that actually does what I'm describing is entropay.com, and they are based in Malta and I don't trust them for big transactions, as they have been known to steal people's money.
Apps that let you manage video game currency often give you so much more control than your bank's app gives you over your real money in your checking account! It's an imbalanced situation, and I think there's a lot of room to improve. Perhaps I can use your API to do something like that.
In the UK this is known as a "standing order". The account holder is fully in control of how much money goes out and when. Is this not the case in other places?
In South Africa we have stop orders and debit orders. Stop orders are for an amount agreed in advance. Debit orders allow the payee to debit your account for whatever amount they choose, obviously with the proviso that they have to produce evidence that you agreed to this, and that they can justify the charge. I've heard some stories about people having issues with unscrupulous payees abusing this, but I believe that's rare. I, for example, pay for my mortgage, credit card, cellphone, satellite TV, etc. via debit order.
I wish I could just have the ability to create virtual credit card numbers. I would be able to fill it with a certain balance, set up recurring balance refills, change the expiration date, keep a merchant whitelist, and cancel the number at any time. This gives me the opportunity to make sure that even if my card number was stolen or abused, the charge won't go through. If I sign up for a free trial or a service I only want for x months but need a card on record, I give them a virtual number and set the card up to cancel itself after the period is up. Or if I want to put all my netflix, hulu, pandora, etc charges on one number, I can set a monthly allowance for each merchant. If someone changes their prices, the charge gets declined and I can go back and reup the limit if I want.
I use entropay.com, which lets you create virtual credit cards, and pre-charge them. And if the account runs out of money, the transaction is declined, and the merchant has no way to get your money after that.
As a warning, there are some problems with entropay.com though. Over the last year, some merchants have been able to detect that entropay.com virtual credit cards are prepaid, and require a plastic card. Also, entropy cards are from Malta, so companies like Spotify or Netflix will only give you access to content licensed there. Finally, and most importantly, entropay.com has a tendency to "float" your money, and I've heard that sometimes they just snatch it. I've never dealt with more than $150 at a time.
Since they are based in Malta, I think it would be very hard to dispute anything with them. But if you have to do any bigger transactions, you should use a bank here anyway. But it's great for trying out services where you don't trust them, or are just concerned with overages. I use them as a buffer for a lot of recurring payments.
I've seen some services on hackernews that offer virtual credit cards, but the problem is, that they all are tied to some underlying checking account, and even if the prepaid balance is declined, the company is obligated to somehow collect the money, if they can. There's no way to simply cancel a recurring payment. I'm sure that this is because they are required to by banks in the US.
I really wanted to have a complex money firewall, like you describe, but in practice, I've ended up just using plain old credit cards for most things. It is still very good to have an entropay account, though.
Exactly. I always imagined a future where there would be an oAuth scopes like gateway for banks. Something like -
This website requires the following permission:
[x] Monthly recurring payments of $20
[o] Automatically get the payments
[ ] Send me the link to deposit every month
> Proceed
> Cancel
Life would have been so simpler then (Obviously I haven't thought this through completely, but something similar to this with proper security would be far superior than our current model of Name + Credit card number + CVV).
I developed a serious allergy to what were called "debit orders" when I used to live outside the USA many years ago. You would sign a form to allow the merchant to debit your bank account every month for (say) a subscription.
Cancellation was theoretically possible by calling or mailing the merchant, but too many times, an extra payment (or two, or three...) went through and it was hell to get the money back. The banks were not much help - you would have to try to get the debit reversed, and it was no fun.
I think I had a few similar experiences here in the USA, but I can't recall specifics. Now I pay everything in "push" mode via online banking, as silly as that may seem.
I hope things like SEPA work better at revocation than what I experienced back in the day!
Hey, @louwhopley. So cool to see this project on HN! Signed up for your early access a few weeks ago and hope to get access soon.
I think there is a lot of opportunities still within
Africa for the informal sector with technology. However, the FICA guidelines make it quite difficult to operate in this space. Do you see a future where we can service this sector better whilst still be compliant?
426 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadEDIT: Found a blog post about it! https://monzo.com/blog/2016/02/03/mondo-api/ cool!
??
For instance, with the reference to a "programmable card". I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it sounds like a feature Monzo doesn't have.
> Many banks in the US let customers use personal financial management software to automatically download their bank statements in OFX format, but most Canadian,[2][3][4] United Kingdom and Australian (CBA exports OFX and QIF files) banks do not allow this.
I'm not criticizing - we need to do better! Developers demand JSON!!! :)
Probably I'm asking for the impossible because of the heavy regulation in Germany but just wanted to put it out there.
https://paymentscompliance.com/premium-content/insights_anal...
Edit: Most banks also seem to support FinTS [0], but it seems a bit of a PITA.
Edit 2: figo might be worth a try as well, though I don't know their pricing.
Edit 3: bunq is quite nice as well. I implemented a few basic calls in node when they launched the API. Not the easiest API to work with, but acceptable.
[0]: https://www.hbci-zka.de/index.htm
[1]: https://www.figo.io/en/
[2]: https://www.bunq.com/de/api
[3]: https://github.com/c0dr/bunq
Other than that, I'm very satisfied with the service, and I use them as my bank bank, but I use Revolut (revolut.com) for my everyday transactions, just because it "feels" nicer. The transparent N26 card definitely turns heads, though, cashiers are always asking me about that.
Weirdly enough barely anyone in Germany ever commented on it while in South Africa people do so every time I'm at a store :D
https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7969-shut_up_and_take_my_money
There used to be (still is?) an API called HBCI, but to my knowlegdge that required a smartcard (maybe not to bad an idea) and was mostly read-only. I think in the early 2000s you could use things like Quicken and MS Money to do homebanking (is this why some people in Germany still have the impression that it is dangerous and complicated?)
I think what "Sofortüberweisung.com" initially did was just to scrape the websites of all major banks, and use the HTML as an API. Then the banks found out they could not do much against it legally (and also fearing backlash because they had no good website-payment solution themselves), and they made some agreements.
For the API - almost all business accounts support HBCI or EBICS. For example my tax accountant and tax software have full access to my business account.
But I think the problem it's attempting to solve is that without Root a bank must implement any kind of features that you may want, Root you allows you to implement any features you want.
Although I can't decide whether this is an amazing thing, or a terrible terrible thing.
edit: I didn't see the Uber example, so I was working off an incorrect premise. It actually makes sense.
How would that work in real life? Uber doesn't charge you before your ride is complete, and at that point your payment would bounce, and now you're in trouble.
Ditto for fast-food diet; nobody's going to be happy when you walk up to the counter at 16 Handles with your big bucket of ice cream and your card doesn't go through.
I suppose the idea is to keep all of this in mind, but it still seems odd.
But you're right - someone will come up with an interesting use case for it. (My first idea was a card for my kid, so they can only make $10 worth of in-game purchases a month.)
Well in the Uber example you're allowing payments to Uber, not denying them.
But you do have a very good point about denying pay-after-use type transactions, I'm not really sure what they're doing about that.
That's the one I was thinking of, note the "lets her take as many Uber rides as she needs".
I kid, the possibility of putting spending rules as code is neat.
I like to immediately take 10% of my pay check off the top for my savings account and investments. As a contractor, I also needed to take money out on my own for taxes. My hours are variable and I was getting paper checks.
Being able to just deposit my check and have a script run that automatically takes care of all of that would be great.
Or for companies who would like a processing pipeline that treat customer's orders once their wire payment arrive (send a confirmation email, activate the product, ...).
Or of course like their snippet shows, for hip companies who want to post activities events on their social powered feed, because "bob bought bagels" is the information you need live at the office !
Or build your own rules to deny certain transactions if you are approaching 0 balance.
I think there are lots of use cases you could think of that are custom to you that no bank would ever build.
Something like this API may make basic income more feasible if we could ensure that people aren't able to blow their budget and go hungry even with basic income.
A traditional bank can't cater to every persons individual needs/wants.
It would be nice to have somewhere these scripts are discoverable so you can use/tweak other users ideas.
Having payments from clients automatically set-aside tax money would be great, too.
2. Fraud detection.
3. Real-time reporting.
The only real answer is privacy, but I would just use BTC instead of USD if I wanted privacy anyway, and BTC is already programmable.
If you have a BoA, Chase, Citi, and Fidelity account, then unless there's a push towards exposing data for third party uses your only option becomes trying to look at 4 dashboards.
To illustrate only one problem. There's also others, including portability: what can you take with you when you decide to switch your 10 year old BoA account to another bank?
ymmv, of course
The ability to aggregate the data from all my accounts would be amazing...
My bank doesn't have this, so that's one reason.
Another would be that a third-party could write the code that performs the analysis, you should be able to just download (or purchase, I suppose) their script and use it, so you don't have to do it yourself anyway. This also means it becomes possible to have competition within this space, right now, you can only ever use your bank's analysis tools, if they're great, fine whatever good for you. But for some people it'll have limitations one way or another. Competition is not a bad thing.
Besides, it can be fun to look at your financial data with your programming tools. It's an interesting data set to play around with, analysis, data visualization, budgeting, even if just for learning.
Think of things like the introduction of cars, or the internet. Their actual effect on most people weren't a matter of obvious problems they had at the time.
Cars weren't released out of the blue by a well-funded startup as a half-baked MVP, they were built off of advances in industrial metallurgy, the invention of the engine, engineering used in trains and boats. Similarly, the internet didn't just happen - people first figured out electrical engineering, circuit boards, GUI's, COBOL and C++ and a myriad of other languages that made it possible to invent the internet.
I'm not saying that this online bank thingie is on that level yet. But for me, these kind of inventions are indicative of the death of institutional finance. The first step in destroying global finance as an institution is to whittle away at where the banks can make profit. Apps like Robin Hood have already helped to decentralize knowledge and participation in the stock market. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have shown at least a proof of concept that you don't need central banks to have currency. Money transfer apps like TransferWise eliminate currency conversion profiteering. Now what happens when you make a front-end that can wire all of these ideas together? A cashless society? Maybe.
I would also say that if you'd told people about those problems thirty years ago, people might have responded 'but I can already communicate with my team using a conference call' and 'I can already sell items through the classified or flea market'. 'What new problems are these things solving?'
I think that most inventions don't do anything particularly new - the kinds of individual tasks you can do with them could have been done before. What they tend to do is provide greater efficiency. And greater efficiency at scale enables new kinds of things to happen.
E.g. think of youtube. It was possible for people to share videos before the internet. E.g. you could have submitted a description of your video to a printed catalogue, and if people wanted to watch it they'd contact you via the catalogue, so you could send them a copy on VHS. What youtube and the internet does is makes it so much easier -- so much more efficient -- that it makes it practical, and the scale enables all sorts of new things to crop up on top of it.
Bank have been very very reluctant to open their systems via API access, which is why there are services like Yodlee. Basic charge is around $20k per annum plus pay per use. They are making a LOT of money, but the service is imperfect because they work by screen scraping the data from bank accounts. They have some direct integrations with banks, but my understanding is that the vast majority is still done via scraping. From end user perspective its terrible - you have to give them your login credentials, and supply OTP/2FA (if your bank uses this) every time you want to pull data in.
The banking industry is being dragged kicking and screaming to modernise and offer proper API access like this.
I'd be able to take in paychecks and other income into a primary account, pay bills and distribute the rest into various accounts (for example, Eating out, Entertainment, Books, Learning, etc) according to some budget. Then I'd like to be able to see how much money I have left on any of these in pretty much real time.
Once you go up to the limit of one of these cards, then you know you've gone over budget. Half-way through the month, you have no more money for Entertainment? Too bad. I think this kind of thing would make it easier to practically stay within your budget.
Wanna go on a holiday? Boom, make a Holiday account, put a certain amount of money on it, and then you know you can spend that much on whatever, while everything else remains constant.
Holiday gift season? Make a budget, make a card, and spend from there, knowing that it's just a bigger hassle to use another card if you run out of gift money.
It's a mandatory-to-implement protocol, which will allow consumers to give 1st and 3rd parties API access to their bank accounts.
I would be more than willing to switch banks just to get a read-only API for this kind of thing, if only it was properly integrated (read: I don't have to give my login details to a third party)
I recommend Starling and Monzo if you want a read-only API for your own account, but if you want to build apps for 65 million customers they're not yet much use to you.
Yodlee is also beyond broken and is made available on very unfriendly terms, e.g. Pricing covered by NDAs complete with very significant setup fees, and minimum commitments.
Also, isn't it going to be reasonably fragile? There's nothing stopping the banks (other than [in my experience] their general inability to make technical changes at a reasonable pace) pushing an update and breaking old API clients, right?
The legal one was looked at by lawyers earlier this year. There were two points to consider:
- copyright infringement via reverse engineering
- "hacking" statutes, e.g. Computer Misuse Act 1990
They concluded that there are no concerns in terms of copyright infringement, we have devised many non-infringing techniques for reverse-engineering and use them wherever possible, not least because they are easier to work with. When it is not possible to use such a technique this is where the exemption kicks in for creating inter-operable systems. FYI "infringement" occurs when transforming a low level language, e.g. machine code, into a high level representation. Computer programs are considered literary works, and their authors enjoy the full protection afforded as such.
The hacking statutes are very broad and technically if you used my laptop to access your own email while I was away in the bathroom you would fall foul of computer hacking laws in the UK. They said action via this angle said is a low risk (despite lawyers being conservative by nature). Teller isn't actually liable anyway, as it does not "cause" the access, the user does. Can a user accessing their own bank account ever be considered unauthorized? Would a bank prosecute their own customers for doing so? Unlikely, given Yodlee has been able to operate without legal challenge for decades now.
In terms of breakage, bank APIs rarely change. Most do not ever. The most aggressively defensive and technically competent bank IMO is Barclays and it takes them months to ship something to mess with me. They also can't just simply break something there is a window where both versions are supported where they advise users to upgrade before forcing the matter some releases down the line.
Best of luck with the future of Teller, you're doing something that I personally think consumer banks should've been offering for years and it's great to see someone filling that gap. I'm hoping Monzo and others end up pushing "legacy" banks into opening up API access but I guess the realist in me finds this unlikely.
The biggest bank is a phone operator and people can send each other money over the phone and from what I understand this is very common. Also interestingly most phones aren't smart phones. It's mostly analog. Banks have a serious incentive to create and encourage cashless societies -- because they're limited by the liquidity ratio.
People there are more skeptical of hard cash there while here it's nearly on par with Gold in terms of confidence.
I don't think I've to explain offering an API allows third party engagement and endorsement and an opportunity for others to grow their service. Yes there are security concerns but these can be all secured from backend.
E.g. My sons school charges 2% extra if i use credit card, Rs 20 if i use netbank and does not accept cash. So on a Saturday i am happy pay in cash when i have nothing else to do.
Unless government makes the transfer without fee (now they can print less money and that cost can be used for this infra of transfer), why is cashless better in the scenario where that saved time is not used for anything value generating?
Genuinely looking for answers to this that makes sense rather than saying time is money.
Feature of cash, not a bug. It's not the best choice for every situation, but neither is digital, which is why it's important that people have both options available.
Which is why the tinfoil me gets change before doing tinfoil purchases xD
Also consider Bitcoin as a "cashless society" alternative to the financial panopticon - no one's looking over your shoulder there and it's definitely not "cash".
I'm clearly in the 'it's nobody's business except for the parties involved' party...
'Cashless' as in 'cash is illegal' terrifies me. It's nothing more than a force multiplier for the power brokers (banks, govs, etc.).
There will always be corruption, theft, etc. But in one scenario, anyone can do it. In another, only the third (one) party can do it. Tell me which is better, oh starry-eyed Valley dreamer?
The actually official Zimbabwe currency can't really be taken seriously because of insane inflation rates.
US Dollars vary greatly in price. Small transaction fees are nothing to operate cashlessly for some of these people compare to the risk of trying to store cash.
Even India recently banned high denomination notes because they were so associated with drugs and illegal behaviour.
> Absolutely -- the police can be very corrupt in Zimbabwe so you don't want hard cash hanging around or it will be taken.
Yes, the police are corrupt but they won't rob you[1], they might try and coerce a bribe.
> The actually official Zimbabwe currency can't really be taken seriously because of insane inflation rates.
This is wrong. It has been wrong for close to a decade because Zimbabwe "demonetized" its currency (Zimbabwean dollar) in 2008 after an infamous bout of hyperinflation - you might have seen/heard of the 100 Trillion dollar note.
1. Unless you have been incapacitated by a traffic accident. A worrying trend has emerged in recent years where passers-by or attending police go through the car and belongings of dead/dying accident victims. See http://www.chronicle.co.zw/chiriseri-corpse-robber-cop-dies-...
(I've never been to Zimbabwe: if there is a difference between cops "coercing" a bribe and what I'm assuming you mean I'd appreciate the clarification!)
Yes: you can say no to coercion but you have no choice when you are being robbed.
Violence (or the threat of it) is a hallmark of robbery: Zimbabwean police will not do that at traffic stops - they are usually not armed. They will, however threaten to impound your vehicle for minor infractions (which would be illegal in most cases) and/or threaten to jail you to wait for your court date. Either of these situations will require paperwork and the money goes to the state and not their pockets, so they make you wait and reconsider the bribe, but eventually let you go. Usually.
Also, in the context of this thread, having cash or money in the bank makes no difference because traffic stops now have portable card machines for "spot fines"!
Making transactions more customizeable/automated is a great advantage. Why would you not want that? Also, this just came out, so it remains to be seen what long term effects it may have.
I fully agree.
WTF are you talking about? No one[1] uses bank transfers to send money to their families in the SADC region: it's quicker and cheaper to use formal and informal money transfer agencies where the recipient gets cash, which is not stolen "90% of the time".
I swear HN seems knowledgeable on all subjects except those I am deeply familiar with...
1. SWIFT transfers do get used for big transactions or paying corporations, but no one I know will be sending amounts less than monthly income this way
You can make a fairly valid extrapolation about the other areas where HN seems knowledgeable from this data point.
I started discounting what I read here about when I realized that.
When I said, "transfer the money from one bank account to another", I actually meant not sending the money physically, but by using various other means. I didn't know how to word this, and it came out wrong.
And I was talking about the cash being stolen 90% of the time, if you do choose to physically carry it with you back home. (Or trust someone else to do it)
This is also not true. 17,000 Zimbabweans[1] travel into South Africa daily by road, most are destined for Musina (nearest South African town to the border) where they buy goods with cash[2]. If theft rate is 90%, that would result in 15,300 cases of theft per day (5.5 million per year) which (a) just can't go unreported, even if you think Zimbabwe is some undeveloped backwater and (b) where do I sign up to join this very effective Thieves Guild? It has to be well-paying.
1. As of 2015, numbers are seasonal. http://www.702.co.za/articles/10509/31-000-people-cross-bord...
2. Because of depleted nostro accounts, most Zimbabwean banks have a maximum international withdrawal of $20-$50 (US dollars) per day
Good old Gell-Mann amnesia.
1. Fees at most banks are high. (A basic account with no transactions typically have fees of several dollar per month).
2. If people are moving away from physical cash, its because of security concerns (theft and robbery), not liquidity.
3. Most transactions are done by credit card, debit order or Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT). EFTs are done between numbered banks account. Mobile to mobile phone transfers are still very rare.
4. People are stubornly loyal to their banks. If root fails, it will be cause of this.
Ahem, ahead of the US, really. Canada and the EU can be cashless already, with chip cards and direct bank withdrawal at the POS a reality for 99.99% of merchants.
But it gets worse than that. If the government wants to punish you, they can just cut you off. Can't buy food, can't pay rent.
Oh you think your friends can help you? China has that covered too, with its shiny new credit system. Being associated with - let alone helping - people cut off from buying food may result in a drastic lowering of score and ability to do business yourself.
On the bright side, used wisely such coersion may he better than outright violence at stopping criminals and terrorists.
The idea that eliminating paper is some sort of boogeyman from Revelations is about as silly as the idea that holding on to your Glock allows you defend your rights against a corrupt government. Neither actually offer any type of protection against these particular issues.
Unless you are wandering around with $20K in cash everyday, your bank account is still subject to the very things you seem to be afraid of. The only thing that changes in a mostly cashless society is your access to your bank account. If the government is going to freeze your account, it matters little if you have a chip card or need to go to the teller.
Thankfully, we in the west have moved most of the management of this to the private sector, and require things like warrants before any real action is done. That can and is an issue at times, but has little effect on the day to day implementation of one method over another.
Try buying Cuban cigars without cash anywhere. Your VISA or MasterCard will mysteriously fail to allow this purchase – because, due to the embargo, these companies just refuse to allow transactions containing the words "cuba", "iran", etc.
VISA and MasterCard also have additional rules of their own, and if you have a society that is cashless, they can just cut you off, too.
This is giving a for-profit entity (which, by its own nature, does not care about you, just about taking your money) far too much power.
Sweden is having that problem: You can’t do anything without a debit card anymore, banks have high fees just to get cash from your account, but the only debit cards you can get are from VISA or MasterCard.
This wouldn’t be an issue if there were many competitors, or even local competitors, or if the systems were open.
The US definition of a "debit card" is massively different than the Canadian one. For us, our bank card is the debit card. The same one I use to take money out of my account at an ATM is the same one I can use to buy a $1 coffee.
Why some banks do charge outrageous fees, thanks to the free market there is a healthy market and many banks in Canada are now fully virtual or offer next to no fees.
Just because a system is poorly designed in one locale does not mean the idea itself is flawed, just that it should be implemented in an improved way.
But that’s the point.
Cuban Cigars are legal in Germany.
You can legally buy them.
But every payment processor that’s located in the US can not process such a transaction.
Relying on foreign companies for most basic needs means you lose a lot of sovereignty.
It's more likely the case that an American credit card holder cannot buy them, even when he is in Germany, because he's subject to American laws, as I would be if I took a box into the US and started selling them.
It went so far that PayPal, VISA and MasterCard ended up threatening several German store chains to stop selling products from Cuba or they’d end all business with the store
It went into national media, and was discussed on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ka26b/paypal_bl...
Rossmann won against PayPal in court, to this date they don’t offer any payment via PayPal.
They came to an agreement with VISA and MasterCard, where if a sale contains embargoed products, everything but these products can be paid by card, but the embargoed products can not.
I keep seeing this pop up, but it's a misconception; we have these in the US too. I have one, although I don't use it for purchases (I use a rewards credit card that gets paid off monthly instead). Here's an example (hopefully Wells Fargo doesn't redirect you because you're in Canada): https://welcome.wf.com/checking/?gclid=CIzL2ong1NMCFVBtfgodb...
The Interac system in Canada is pretty much a given for any vendor that has a cash register. That automatically makes every single bank card into a direct debit card. You can choose to use it if you want of course, but it's default for all bank accounts, really.
Uhh, which ones? Free chequing accounts have transaction fees for Interac, and with unlimited Interac accounts you pay monthly or must keep a minimum balance. I'm sure there are a couple exceptions, but certainly not with TD, CIBC, NBC, etc.
You do have to show government ID to get a cell phone or purchase long-distance train tickets. Also checking into a higher end hotel. And since using public Wi-Fi requires you to authenticate with your Chinese phone number, that's also effectively linked to your ID. There are many aspects of Chinese society that are easily trackable by the government, but commerce does not seem to be one of them, at least from what I've seen.
the social credit system you are talking about isn't actually in effect yet. once it is? yeah, it'll be pretty fucked up. I suspect it will get thrown out or heavily modified before then. but again - it will hold no power over people who use cash at small markets.
I'm not trying to defend the government here, but please have your facts straight so as to prevent you from spouting nonsense like the post above. criticism is most effective when it is accurate.
The issue of "un banked" can be distinctly American too, actually. Given the extent of social programs in Can/EU, even the nearly homeless have bank accounts, because government funds are pushed directly into accounts, and it's more secure/timely than receiving a physical cheque. Not having a simply checking account is a very rare thing in Canada.
e.g. "You've already spent over your monthly Amazon budget by X amount, are you sure you want to make this $200 purchase?"
disclaimer: Not a root dev just a user on the zatech slack group
I think tech people vulnerable to buzzwordism have an instinctive response to respond to any mention of money with "blockchain!", even though it's really only useful in this context for decentralized payment systems (i.e. not for banks). The only place banks might want to use blockchains is for low-trust inter-bank settlement.
edit: if it is the case, I would be excited to see some docs
Can this interact with FNB or ABSA accounts? Is it international? In short, what are the limits?
Also, I just want to say this is really cool. I've wanted something like this for ages.
- for the stack was there specific criteria why certain languages where chosen in your use cases?
are there any API rate limits for clients?
are there any current plans on mitigating DDOS or other malicious attacks?
2016 has been a hard year for banks and hacking specifically the story about Bangladesh. The trend seems that this will become more likely as we move towards a full online infrastructure. For banking this is another layer where vulnerabilities can come up are there are plans in place for this?
I'm not affiliated with Root, but the bank they are partnering with (Standard Bank of South Africa) was also hacked in 2016 and defrauded of R300 million ($16 million) via withdrawals from ATMs in Japan[1]. I'm sure they are acutely aware of the need for security.
1. http://city-press.news24.com/Business/standard-bank-r300m-fr...
I'm interested in two pieces of data we couldn't get there, but that I had really high hopes for.
1) Dynamic merchant-type filtering before auth. For example, if tom has spent 50$ on food this month, all merchants that identify as "food" will fail auth on further transaction attempts. I'm not sure if these are still called MCCs outside of the US, or "merchant codes".
2) Level 3/line item receipt data. For example, instead of showing I spent 5.00 at QuikEMart, it shows 2.50 on soda, 2.00 candy bar, 0.50 tax.
Will your platform offer that level of control/visibility?
I'm not sure what Standard Bank is doing with regards to 3DS, but it would certainly be neat if its implementation were programmable as well.
- Do you have programmable virtual credit card numbers?
- Have you considered virtual bank account numbers as well? For example, I have had issues with organizations continuing to deduct from my account via ACH after stopping service. If I had a virtual bank account number that could be deleted, those rascals could be stopped in their tracks the moment I make the call saying "you are no longer authorized to deduct from my account". With the current system banks still let the unauthorized ACH transactions slide.
Marqueta can do this. You can issue CC's via api, and then fund them with Visa direct. It's amazing.
https://www.marqeta.com/
Unless things have changed recently, please watch out for the money laundering laws if you are in the USA. It is easier than you might think for absolutely innocent people to fall foul of them, making life miserable (speaking from experience).
https://edfine.io/blog/2015/12/20/how-bofa-froze-my-account-...
1) Is the API limited to types of transactions or do you host configuration information? For example, I've often wished for a bank account that would look at my outgoings and some criteria that I've set, and then allocate some monies to savings or investments on a percentage basis rather than an absolute number. Are those calculations something I'd need to do at my end and then send you a bunch of API calls to make the transaction, or would they run as bots on your server? Sorry if that's not very clear
2) Will you impose tight or narrow restrictions on who can open accounts? For example in the USA many banks require an SSN to open an account and won't accept an ITIN (another kind of tax ID sometimes issued to immigrants), placing millions of people outside the banking system and thus making it that much more difficult for them to pay bills etc.
3) Will your service have access to the SWIFT network for international transfers or are you subject to restrictions while you prove some sort of banking bona fides? I don't know anything about banking relationships in South Africa or so but I've noticed the US is very aggressive about limiting transaction access for anything that looks like it could be remotely connected to crime of any kind, and I have sometimes had the impression that US banks are very 'suspicious' of anything that might coincidentally pose a threat to their business model.
I want to wish you a lot of luck and am very excited to see where this might go. I've never enjoyed dealing with money or finance, and get no more enjoyment out of being paid than I do out of paying bills. Financial chores are about as much fun as cleaning a toilet and the idea of being able to reduce the amount of time spent on dealing with money without putting myself at financial risk sounds heavenly.
(1) A mixture of the two. We do allow you to write code that we host for you, to make prototyping (or building small features) easier and quicker, and you can access it all through the API, so you could do everything through a few https calls. (All account transactions are available to you)
(2) We try our best to make everything as seamless as possible, but we still have to comply with local regulations. We're working hard to create the best user experience possible given the tightly controlled environment we're in.
(3) That's part of the plan, yes :)
why are you doing this? you're ruining society.
2) What are your plans for supporting other languages? (cough Ruby cough)
3) How would I make a script integrate with a 3rd service?
In all seriousness, I would be fairly worried running someone else's code on my bank account unless it was very straightforward. Even forgoing malice and incompetence, there's plenty of "wow, that's a crazy interaction between systems that wasn't obvious" to go around.
Would that be possible with your API?
Would that be possible with your API?
Separately, looking to make this a platform for other vendors to issue cards? E.g., so another company can add logic for say, a teenager's card that the parents manage, and use your platform for this?
Our banking laws are favorable to startups; I could start my own bank, if I wanted to, for little more than the cost of a business license. Many merchants run their own little micro-banks, partly because of the aforementioned problem. Please help :)
Seems legit. Also, I hope that CC number on your top background image is flagged to never be handed out to a real customer ;)
Otherwise this looks promising. I hope to see something like this in the USA soon!
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/its-bonkers-that-...
Wait, what? Code you write yourself?
Sounds like they may have accidentally provided the perfect solution to different problem: technical recruiting and screening.
No more technical interviews. If your code doesn't work, you don't get your money. Woo hoo, problem solved.
Which is probably a good thing, to be honest.
Many national American banks are toxically opposed to actual modernization, for a variety of reasons. Their classical "enterprise" beliefs on security put all the banks I've talked to well behind the curve.
But also, I want to avoid a scenario where the US is a principle innovator in technology and also in finance.
That is true of many, but not of all. I work for a US bank of national scope that IS working hard to achieve actual modernization.
Good luck.
spoiler: it still exists, and their solution was to have him sign his soul away and shut up about it.
one day (!!!)
Hi Ondřej,
We're launching in South Africa, but have plans to expand to the EU/US in the near future.
Be sure to sign up to our waiting list, as we'll keep everyone there posted on new events :)
This is a totally reasonable feature. If a merchant wants assurance that they will be paid, they should charge a deposit.
The closest I've had is Entropay, but I don't really trust them for large payments.
Recurring payments are so abused, I can't count how many times I have been mislead. And there is a strong financial incentive to mislead people. And having to contact my credit card company after the fact is not good enough.
Most subscription-based businesses that go to your bank account get an authorization to do an "ACH pull". In some instances, this authorization alone can act as collateral (e.g., in securing payday loans or medical payment agreements). As such, I would assume that allowing consumers to revoke the authorization is more problematic than it sounds.
I would love to be able to script my bank. Chase.com is an ongoing battle. There are plenty of projects to automate banking, but it's an uphill battle.
I'm sure if I had a business account, I'd have more access than what the browser gives me.
I would love to be able to do things like, see what payments are flagged as recurring, and group them together, and sum them.
Right now, the scale is not tipped in my favor. I would be happy to pay for it.
I understand that banks have reasons for things to be arraigned the way they are.
I would love to have a "personal firewall" level of control over my money. I'd like to see that Widget of the month club is requesting $50, and I can confirm/deny it.
I only signed up for a widget of the month because it seemed like a good idea, but they deceived me into thinking I could back out at any time, and then when I cancelled my account, they just "paused" it for three months.
We don't use the "banking" model for other resources that are supposed to be our property. An app on my phone isn't supposed to be able to delete my photos, and the accepted solution is not that I call some external entity to undelete them. I know that these examples are very different, but that is what I would like.
I can also simply block someone from contacting me if I want, without having to justify it to my isp. I want to be able to do that with my money. If someone disagrees with me doing this, and thinks I still owe them money, they can be free to sue me, or do some other sanctions.
Right now, I create virtual credit cards and only fund them enough to pay my recurring payments. I want to automate it.
95% of the time, recurring payments that fail for me are done in bad faith, and these actors will not make a fuss if they can't process their payments.
I know this is probably a pipe dream, and that there are already system I can use, and that our financial system is set up the way it is for reasons. But that's a pain point for me, and a lot of people. People would like to be empowered, and feel that they have control. I think, in the end, things won't really change. Most people will still pay legitimate charges.
[1] https://root.co.za/images/rootcode.svg
[2] https://root.co.za/images/mobile-desktop-mockup.jpg
EDITS: added 2nd part and formatting
This would be fine for in-person transactions, where you can approve it on your phone, but for transactions you aren't expecting (e.g. recurring monthly subscriptions) it seems like you'd need some notice -- or a long timeout period.
It would also be cool if a bank could abstract bill payments for me, where they present the debit, and show the time window to pay it, and let me select what business day to process it on.
Actually, all of these services exist in one form or another. If you have a business account. And most banks have bill payment processing. But I'm surprised that no bank is offering these services bundled together, directly to consumers. I'd happily pay for a checking account console.
Yes, even just a list of the recurring payments (that is updated in realtime and that you can centrally discontinue) should be available to the banking consumer -- and it should be the responsibility of the banking entity to provide this feature.
The do not, because the financial sector makes its revenue from payments occurring, rather than not. A consumer would naturally gravitate towards a bank that was not limited by this concern (or derived equivalent profit elsewhere for provision of value)
The only company I have found that actually does what I'm describing is entropay.com, and they are based in Malta and I don't trust them for big transactions, as they have been known to steal people's money.
As a warning, there are some problems with entropay.com though. Over the last year, some merchants have been able to detect that entropay.com virtual credit cards are prepaid, and require a plastic card. Also, entropy cards are from Malta, so companies like Spotify or Netflix will only give you access to content licensed there. Finally, and most importantly, entropay.com has a tendency to "float" your money, and I've heard that sometimes they just snatch it. I've never dealt with more than $150 at a time.
Since they are based in Malta, I think it would be very hard to dispute anything with them. But if you have to do any bigger transactions, you should use a bank here anyway. But it's great for trying out services where you don't trust them, or are just concerned with overages. I use them as a buffer for a lot of recurring payments.
I've seen some services on hackernews that offer virtual credit cards, but the problem is, that they all are tied to some underlying checking account, and even if the prepaid balance is declined, the company is obligated to somehow collect the money, if they can. There's no way to simply cancel a recurring payment. I'm sure that this is because they are required to by banks in the US.
I really wanted to have a complex money firewall, like you describe, but in practice, I've ended up just using plain old credit cards for most things. It is still very good to have an entropay account, though.
https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-cards/shopsaf...
This website requires the following permission:
Life would have been so simpler then (Obviously I haven't thought this through completely, but something similar to this with proper security would be far superior than our current model of Name + Credit card number + CVV).You usually pay via SEPA recurring transfers, and just authorize a company to take $n money monthly (and can easily revoke).
Or you set up an automated recurring transaction to transmit that much money.
Or you allow a company to take just any amount, at any time, but you can revoke each transfer.
This last is how you usually connect debit cards, credit cards, Amazon, PayPal, to your account.
Cancellation was theoretically possible by calling or mailing the merchant, but too many times, an extra payment (or two, or three...) went through and it was hell to get the money back. The banks were not much help - you would have to try to get the debit reversed, and it was no fun.
I think I had a few similar experiences here in the USA, but I can't recall specifics. Now I pay everything in "push" mode via online banking, as silly as that may seem.
I hope things like SEPA work better at revocation than what I experienced back in the day!
I think there is a lot of opportunities still within Africa for the informal sector with technology. However, the FICA guidelines make it quite difficult to operate in this space. Do you see a future where we can service this sector better whilst still be compliant?