Launch HN: Fuse (YC W19) – Unified API for financial data aggregators
If you're building a product that requires customers to link their financial accounts, you might integrate a financial data aggregator (such as Plaid, Truelayer, or Finicity) to connect with your user's bank account. You’ll probably then experience the following issues: customers unable to use your product because their financial institution is not supported (e.g., credit unions, local or community banks); frequent disconnections; API errors; and high drop-offs during the bank linking flow.
We spent 2.5 years developing YSplit, a fintech app providing joint spending cards for couples. Users linked their bank accounts for spend limits but faced issues with unsupported banks and frequent disconnections. We looked at other apps and saw that the ideal solution was to rely on multiple aggregators, but it wasn’t the right use of engineering resources for that startup. Upon pivoting from YSplit, though, we decided to go back to that problem and address it.
We provide a UI component for React, React Native, Flutter, iOS & Android native to facilitate bank account linkage within your app. When a user taps on an institution, we use a time series model to identify the most optimal aggregator to show based on historical success rates and disconnection as well as downtime. After linkage, we provide a Fuse access token for querying balance, transactions, and more via our unified API, offering a consistent model irrespective of the aggregator.
We also provide other products to translate historical bank data into consumer/business credit risk to help you answer questions like: How much credit can I feel comfortable offering this user or company? Is a user likely to pay me on time? Can I offer instant ACH to this customer?
By combining aggregators, you gain from their diverse connection methods, favoring APIs over screen scraping. Our customers have cut disconnections by 16%, increased coverage by 5k institutions in the US, and boosted conversions by 20% with Fuse. Moreover, we support aggregators in Africa, Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia, enabling global product expansion with a single API.
We don't store personal info and only act as a pass-through. We are currently undergoing SOC 2 II audit and can provide engagement letters for anyone looking to go to production.
We have a self-serve onboarding https://dashboard.letsfuse.com to get sandbox keys. Our docs are available here https://docs.letsfuse.com. We’d love for you to try it and give us feedback on improvements to the product and docs. If you have any feature requests or any aggregators you’d like us to support, let us know.
37 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 79.1 ms ] threadHere's an example webhook: { type: 'transactions.updates', financial_connection_id: "financial_connection_id", environment: "sandbox", source: "teller", //Boolean indicating whether historical transaction information (up to 24 months) is ready to be queried. historical_transactions_available: true, //An array of string transaction ids indicated the transactions that have been removed and will not be available if the transactions are queried again. Currently only supported by plaid removed_transaction_ids: [ "tx_1234", "tx_5677" ] remote_data: {} }
We also partner with some of the aggregators, so if you wanted to combine your existing one with a new one, we can help you setup the contract with no effort on your end.
Our unified endpoints are also backward compatible, so if you pass in an aggregator access token instead of a Fuse access token it'll work as expected.
Happy to answer any other questions you have
So if our customers want to use another service or build it out themselves in house at a later date, they can always get all the original tokens.
We've also seen some of our customers use this endpoint to get access to original tokens and use it to make a request that we don't support yet via the original aggregator.
By region, I’m interested what you cover in Australia.
You can find the other aggregators we've unified here: https://fuseconnect.canny.io/
Here's a list of all the aggregators we support and their institutions: https://fuseconnect.canny.io/
Very meta-meta-ish. Exciting, but also a lot of dependencies. Good luck!
but I immediately received an error:
The response was:Sorry, those two statements are in contradiction. Which one is true?
On a more opinionated front, consumer "credit" risk specifically based on personal deposit account balances and transactions is an insanely privacy violating and unregulated (generally) offering. Business is different. Why even go consumer?
Over the past few years a lot of consumer apps have started using bank data to determine credit risk for customers. From our experience this is generally accepted by consumers, as credit data does not provide the full picture. For example, I am originally from the UK and after moving to the US, I had no credit history so it was generally hard for me to use any service that could not determine risk based on cash flow.
We also offer Business Risk Report.
My priorities are privacy first then wider coverage for bank accounts. I'd rather some consumers are blocked form accessing the service than having their transaction data getting leaked to intermediaries.
I wouldn't expect this use case to be filled by a business. It's just not a good market to go after unless you like picking up pennies.
In regards to coverage in the UK, we currently support Truelayer and we are building out a Tink and SaltEdge integration. They'll be available early next month.
I don't use any product that forces me to use Plaid because they copy my transaction info. If anyone knows of aggregators that respect privacy please share them, AFAIK there are none.