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."
Premium features (Score:2, Insightful)
If you can access it with a browser, you can script it too.
Unfortunately businesses always ask more for not-so-common and premium features. This is also quite close access to their internal systems and since it's probably 0.01% of customers who need such access, they have to ask more from those who actually need it. Banks have to develop, secure and maintain the system too and it costs.
Re:"Friendly" and "Bank" in the same sentence? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm quite sure banks are really friendly to you if you have enough money.
Re:DIY Credit Union (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what your plans are for a bank that would use the protocols that you describe, but I can tell you that as a small business, the one that is most "friendly" to me is the one that doesn't structure its fees and accounts to milk you for every transaction.
There was actually a time in this country, before "deregulation" when banks made money from taking in deposits, lending that money out and charging interest. They would pay you compound interest for the money that you deposited with them. Sometimes, they'd give you a toaster or a blender on top of the compound interest
That was it: deposits and loans. And they were able to get rich beyond imagining from that simple, honest business model. They built huge, ornate buildings with cupolas and pillars and marble floors that squeaked when you walked on them. There made so much money that they built gilded temples with a tiny fraction of the profits. Generation after generation, they just got rich, bless their hearts.
But then came "deregulation" when banks decided that the unimaginable wealth they could accumulate from the "deposits and loans" model was just not sexy enough. They needed more. Their shareholders demanded more. They not only needed to make even greater wealth, but the rate at which they made tons of money had to increase every single quarter.
Flash forward a few decades, and banks don't really care for deposits and loans any more, because there are these exotic, sexy bits of fiction called "derivatives". They are the banking equivalent of scratch-off Lotto tickets. They fucked it up so badly that the entire economy went into a tailspin, from which we are only now beginning to recover. They fucked things up so badly that they can't even make money from the old-fashioned "deposit and loan" model that worked so well for so long, so now they invented a new profit center, known as "fees". But since their customers have things like computers and calculators and other modern tools for adding up columns of numbers, they have to make these fees hidden and confusing, like ninjas, so that unless you are very, very careful (and maybe even then) you will end up paying a fee. For example, for years my business account has been "free" as long as I keep a certain balance. Then, one day, in a codicil buried three pages deep in a special agreement rider that they mentioned on the back side of page 3 of my monthly statement, they said that unless I used the debit card for that business account at least 5 times within every month, I would be charged $100 for the privilege of letting them hold my money. Further, the "month" is counted not the way we count months, from say April 1 to May 1, but from some shifting day which is tied to the statement period. And by the way, that "month" ends at the open of business tomorrow, so sorry, but you've been charged $100. Don't worry, though, because we deducted it from your account without mentioning it to you before. If it wasn't for a lady that I went to high school with who works at the bank who clued me, I'd never have known about this little trick and would have been hit with that $100 at least once, if not for several months because I didn't expect this kind of sleazy behavior from a business with such a spiffy and noble-looking building with marble floors, so I don't pour over my monthly statements like the Torah, because the only people who can use the account are me and my wife and I know how much money is supposed to be there, give or take, so if it's in the ballpark, I assume that money isn't being funneled out with such arcane practices.
When President Obama and the liberal Democrats in congress proposed requiring the banks to actually disclose this innovative profit center known as "fees", there immediately went up a hue and cry that these regulations were Marxist and Communist and Fascist and Czarist and probably Muslim in some secret way, because
This isn't straightforward (Score:5, Insightful)
Five digit sums for remote access, per year? Hell, it'll cost half of that just for the security software licences, let alone administration overheads, hardware, networks... Corporate data exchange is not cheap, it's not easy and it's not something you throw together in a hurry for a bank relationship.
Most banks offer corporate customers the ability to manage their own accounts. This includes web or fat client deployment, download of files/reports (including transaction histories and balances) and submission of payment mandates.
Use the interfaces already provided, and shop around for the cheapest bank. Nobody offering the interface you want at the price you want? Deal with it.
Or start your own bank. You too can put up with the horrendous regulatory framework, the stunning liabilities resulting from membership of various payment schemes and the complexity of managing multiple payment mechanisms for multiple customers in a timely and (above all) accurate manner at lower cost than all of your competitors.
After all, you think everybody else is clearly doing it wrong. Go for it, show us how to be better.
Flash? (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be true for HTML. Unfortunately, many banks have flash-only access.
Re:DIY Credit Union (Score:5, Insightful)
You must like listening to yourself talk.
Flash forward a few decades, and banks don't really care for deposits and loans any more, because there are these exotic, sexy bits of fiction called "derivatives". They are the banking equivalent of scratch-off Lotto tickets.
Sounds like this is taken verbatim out of some bestseller that's popular with the masses. Derivatives are no more "fictional" than other types of securities -- they're just slightly more complex. They're also nothing like Lotto tickets. Please learn about actual derivatives in the real world, such as options [wikipedia.org] and credit default swaps [wikipedia.org]. Both are derivatives, both are useful to our society, neither is fictional, and neither is anything like a Lotto ticket.
Don't worry too much about the protocols that the banks data comes in. Just try to find a local bank or credit union whose business model is not completely based on fucking you over. Try to create a relationship with a human being at the bank itself.
In other words, "I don't know anything about the topic at hand, but I have strong opinions about something unrelated, and I'll be damned if I don't ejaculate them every place I can."
Please, don't bring down the average IQ of this discussion.
Re:DIY Credit Union (Score:3, Insightful)
Can I interject something into your post?
OK. So it used to be that banks did what you said: they took your money and loaned it and made money on interest and that was great.
So what happened between then and now?
Government producing giant amounts of money happened. Government printing money, getting off the gold standard happened. Government setting up minimum wage laws and taxing income and in various ways regulating and thus creating Giant Monopolies happened.
The economy of savings (like putting money in a bank and holding it there) was gone. The Government decided that to satisfy its desire never to shrink with an economic downturn (a bust, which is a fix for the boom problem) it must adopt the Keynesian economics model, which is this: Government must encourage consumption.
Government must encourage consumption and NOT production. That's the policy. How, do you ask, do they approach this? Bizarre income tax laws, that allow you to deduct interest payments on things like houses; regulation to get rid of competition (this is the part where large corporations took over by the way), encouraging people to get into debt to buy those gadgets that the Producer nations were supplying very cheaply and in great quantities. Housing bubble is a Government creation, it is the credit bubble that is fueled by the Government Insuring unsustainable lending to people who cannot pay for a house if the interest rates go up even a bit, the lending with no down-payment, that's the idea: you buy a house and it will go up in price and you don't ever need to worry about anything, you can sell it and get more cash out then if you were working even, or you can walk away, I mean the banks would own it and sell it themselves, right? Because the idea was that the prices never go down, and that idea is Government driven!
Government setting interest rates at 0%, printing money and giving it to their friends and to anybody it seems, who bothers to ask for it, I mean ask the Fed who they give money to? They won't tell you.
So in this situation what possible SAVINGS are you talking about? What savings? Who has savings? Savings don't make any sense in this economy, you can live by borrowing forever, so of-course nobody save anything, everyone lives on credit.
Good luck opening a bank that operates by taking these ephemeral 'savings' and lending them to anyone.
Do you know how the largest banks make their incredible profits today? They get the money at 0% from the Fed and then they buy T-Bills printed by the Fed that actually have a return that is MORE than 0%. There you go, you make money. Try competing with that kind of a business model, nobody can.
Re:DIY Credit Union (Score:3, Insightful)
No bait. Theoretically, all derivatives are useful to our society in the same way that all free-will economic transactions are useful to our society. They allow both parties to be better off—otherwise the transaction wouldn't occur.
Every book on options discusses the benefits (and dangers) of every options position—they all have a role. Some provide insurance, others provide leverage.
Whether insurance (or amount of leverage) should be regulated is another matter.
Re:DIY Credit Union (Score:2, Insightful)
Keynes is wrong all around. 'Charging up' the economy that NEEDS the bust is wrong, it only delays and worsens the inevitable collapse. Boom and bust are totally normal parts of a cycle - bust is the fix for the boom. Boom is expansion, boom allows inefficiencies to grow, bust removes the inefficiencies, restructures the market. Before the US Government decided to control this with Keynes ideas the market in US had normal boom/bust cycles and busts normally lasted months, no more than a year and happened maybe once in a decade. That is good, that is not bad, it allows removing the fat. Sure it kills some jobs, but the restructuring brings them back quickly. The Great Depression was a normal Depression after Government intervention that decided it would print money and set lending standards.
Keynes ideas failed also to predict what would happen after the WWII, while the Austrian school of economics predicted it correctly. Keynes ideas failed by deducing that after the war, too many people would come home and the unemployment would be high. Austrian school predicts that abundance of labor is good for production, it allows the capital to work together with the labor to produce new things, plus Austrians actually noticed that women were the ones working back in the US and that they would go back home, really, while it is great for women to be Able to work and get the same pay as man, many would prefer not to, they are forced to when the man stop making enough to support the family.
Keynes entire idea that Government can control Economy is ridiculous. Government can allow the Economy (Free Market) to work or it can interfere. Guess what the politicians always chose? Why would they want economy to work and why would they want to see Boom / Bust cycles? After all, Governments are a burden, they are not producers and their spending programs should be the first to go during a bust and that means losing jobs for many Government employees, they can't have it.
Re:DIY Credit Union (Score:3, Insightful)
Any business that deals with commodities benefits from the availability of derivatives like options and futures because it helps them plan for future costs and protect against sharp volatility.
I have a great example for you. There's a big problem in Pakistan right now because of fluctuations in the price of cotton. Two related industries depend on cotton -- the yarn industry and the higher level textile industry (t-shirts and towels and such) -- but handle the business risk of cotton prices differently.
The yarn industry is smaller and more competitive. Since domestic cotton hedge trading has been banned in Pakistan for decades, the yarn industry actually imports a lot of cotton (which they can secure with futures and options). Because of hedge trading they engaged in last year when prices were lower, they are able to fulfill their international contractual obligations and still remain profitable despite rising input prices.
The textile industry has massive government support. They don't worry so much about business risk because the government bails them out whenever necessary. For instance, the government just enacted a 15% export duty on yarn so that the yarn producers will have to sell their product domestically below the international market price.
Now the yarn industry got royally screwed because of the 15% surprise cost in fulfilling their international orders. This is directly attributable to the lack of risk management in the textile industry, or rather the manner in which the textile industry manages risk (heavy-handed government intervention rather than open market methods). The yarn industry is appealing the decision in court and says they will have to shut down about 70% of their industry (basically all the producers with a large component of export sales) if the decision is not reversed.
I'm not an expert on Pakistan so I may not have the full background correct, but in general most industries that deal with raw commodities benefit from being able to reduce price volatility.
Re:What do you expect... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh. Can't anybody on Slashdot read in context? Of course I don't think that banks just magically appear. I wasn't asking if it's possible to start a bank. I was asking if it's possible for an ordinary person with no capital or business connections to start a bank.
When I followed the link you sent me, I ended up on an advertising page for some webinar or something. If there was a way past it, I couldn't find it.
So a googled "Start a bank". Got nothing but links for schemes to avoid taxes by starting an offshore bank or other business. I think most or all of them were scams.
Re:Flash? (Score:4, Insightful)
More reality (Score:4, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I am a developer in one of America's largest banks.
Of course, I do not speak for them - just for me.
That said, think about what the OP is asking.
He wants unfettered access to funds transfer information.
Just to keep righteous with the Feds, we'd have to forcibly limit his access to accounts only his business has - it's not like we could open the tap and just let him run BAI queries on any account he can think of, the way our own internal users can.
But a web portal with customer-keyed access is already present, and isn't good enough for Mr. LookAtMeI'mABigBadCoder.
So we'd have to build him a distinct data transfer channel, test the hell out of it to make sure he can't break it and look at someone else's stuff or - God forbid - foul up our nightly batch cycle with stupid data requests outside of standard Banking hours. Then we'd have to test it with him involved to make sure it returns the data he wants.
All that is probably a several hundred hour project. Per customer. For something no one ever wants but this yahoo.
Of course, several hundred hours assumes the full banking software is Bank-owned. Most folks outsource this stuff, so we'd have to test cross-vendors with him, too, generating costs for us.....
You want it for free?
You're fucking clueless.