Developer-Friendly Banks? 158
tyen writes "Any suggestions for a 'developer-friendly' bank for small businesses? The banking world is awash in data protocols that business customers who are/have coders would find useful, like BAI to extract all the raw data from an ACH or SWIFT transfer. Unfortunately, the ones I have spoken with about this access are still stuck in the Dark Ages of computing; they price the access like only big companies still have the skills to tap into these interfaces. For example, one of the four US banks with a perfect trading record this past quarter quoted us USD five figures for access to several of our accounts via BAI format. Per year. After waiving sign-up fees. Are there any banks out there that have a more progressive attitude about letting small, entrepreneurial developers work with their business accounts in a more modern, dare we say automated, way? With big businesses demanding EFT integration from small business vendors, and globalization rewarding premiums to nimble, lean businesses that automate wherever possible, automating the retrieval of this information (which is not available in consumer-oriented access like OFX) becomes an increasingly pressing issue for the small guys."
Re:Good Luck with that. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Premium features (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, but the problem with screen-scraping is that you'll spend a large chunk of your life trying to turn HTML back into the structured data it would have started at before the bank's systems processed it and dealing with every tiny little change which may not be immediately obvious to the naked eye but may well affect the processing. Which is a PITA if that's not your main business.
Wired had an article about this... (Score:3, Informative)
The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free [wired.com]/
Basically from what I can tell it sounds like you're going to have to go with a startup type bank/payment service like Paypal which has actually made an effort to open its platform up.
I suspect most traditional banks won't change significantly for at least a few decades. My bet would be on ING and its brethren to open up first, try talking with them.
Re:Premium features (Score:3, Informative)
The reality of the situation. (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I write financial software for a living.
First, I don't see why OFX can't be used for that purpose. You could manage several hundred accounts, payroll, billpay, collections, wire transfers, funds management, etc. Not only that, it's two-way. It's not just displaying account data, it allows you to perform the actual transactions. I know of some payroll processing centers that use OFX for exactly this - either it goes to printer or it goes electronic.
Second, because there is no salable demand for individuals requesting the raw file formats for the backend transfers, those features don't exist. This is common sense - what motivation exists for a company to spend the time and effort providing a feature if there is no money attached to it.
Third, certification. There is quite a bit of hullabaloo in the banking industry about certification, and they're serious. See, there's not a lot of security in the banking world. They rely on hard connections, network separation, and effectively, trust. What they DO have though, is auditing trails. They might not be able to stop a fraudulent ATM transaction, but they can tell you every node, clearing house, third party processor or financial institution it went through. Certification is the thing that allows them to reasonably trust members in their transactional world - you can't just show up with homegrown software and hook right in.
Last, as you said, "The banking world is awash in data protocols". Lemme tell you something - the raw protocols are only about 1/20'th of what goes on. No protocol is perfect, and many systems have what you or I might consider 'undocumented features' that are handled by clever manipulation of the protocol (aka, hacks). The paper description, for example, of the ACH file format can be compressed into about 6 pages. There is a two volume set of books, each about 300 pages, of small print, so thin as to be nearly transparent pages that actually describes how those 8 pages work.
That's one protocol. There are dozens of major ones, and additional complexities when you add in feature specific cores or sinks (back end systems that banks use to store the actual data on, like those provided by MISER or Fiserv )- do you support overdraft protection, provide memo services (a hold against an account for an amount prior to it's actual processing), and if so, which of the dozen ways do you provide that information?
So in the end;
* no real financial benefit to providing that access (especially when you say you don't want to pay XD )
* no certification to provide that access
* actual software knowledge requires domain knowledge many magnitudes greater than just file formats, including per-FI non-public knowledge
last and not the least important items not discussed above;
* financial institutions are slow movers when it comes to adopting technology.
* early adopters are NEVER the small banks, and they always require a hefty ($$$$) reason to include it.
So it could be done - and probably will in the next 20 years or so - but not today. ...
as an aside,
The reason you'd be getting billed 5 figures for access is because they'd end up assigning someone to manually pull your ACH records out of each daily batch and save them to one side. Manually. They may even need to have someone actually type the new entries in (separation of networks, removable media would be disallowed - of course.)
River City Bank (Score:2, Informative)
Small progressive smart banking. I work for a small developer that makes software that connects their system to accountants across the country.
Try to talk to Eric King, If you have a good idea for a service they could be offering, he'd be the one to talk to.
http://www.rivercitybankky.com [rivercitybankky.com]
Hillarious ... (Score:5, Informative)
I stopped reading after like 5 insightful/interesting posts.
Note to the Article poster: SWIFT is a bank to bank network. You will never get access to it as a non bank, and if you hack into it ... prey that no one figures it.
To the others pointing out why the OP never will find what he wants:
You ofc. can ignore all my "for free" claims above, as that is not for free but covert by the base yearly fees.
To the OP: try Pay Pall, they have an oen API to access them, no idea how useful that is for you or which applications exist to use it reasonable.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Re:DIY Credit Union (Score:2, Informative)
Okay, I'll take the bait. Setting aside covered shorts, name a derivative that is useful to our society. My stance is that uncovered shorts are, essentially insurance and should be regulated as such.
Re:What do you expect... (Score:5, Informative)
Tell you what... You think this is a brilliant way to make money? Open your own bank.
Really? Have you done it? Can you point me to somebody who's done it?
I've been directly involved in the creation of two banks in my career and indirectly involved in a half-dozen more. Detail vary, but you generally need to raise less than $10 million. You also need a lot of patience. New banks take years to start making money.
Re:ACH (Score:1, Informative)
ACH is amazingly complex but is the best option for bank transfers in the US. But you have to fulfill a dozen of requirements before being able to tap into it. As far as I remember they asked for a *huge* guarantee. Just think about this: once you can get into the NACHA you can transfer money from any account. That responsibility means that you have to be able to cope with any kind of liability of use of the system.
Re:What might this look like? (Score:2, Informative)
I want to log in and instantly know how much money I have, while still being able to drill down into individual accounts to access the transaction history.
CIBC offers this in Canada.
I want to be able to transfer money between my accounts quickly and easily, without fees or limits.
This too.
I want to be able to pay bills on line,
This too.
have checks cut and then mailed to me, I want to deposit checks by scanning them at home and I want to generate disposable credit card numbers for online purchases.
No luck on this stuff. The disposable credit card numbers would be nice.
Ask the right question (JPMC) (Score:3, Informative)
What you are looking for is generally called 'treasury accounts' - it is expected for bank in that case to provide some kind of electronic access with full details (in/out wires, etc). Most big banks do offer that.
Try Chase - it's not cheap but not unreasonable either (something like 100$ per month plus some per-user fees etc). I have that and it's fine. Plus you get SecurID token to authenticate outgoing wires, etc.
Unfortunately, you kind of have to write a screen scraper to get to the CSV reports, but the data is there.