> try solving human problems by dealing with human’s
Welp. I actually tried it. Here's my experience.
I contacted my banks and got in touch with their managers and devs. They do have APIs. I wanted to use those to create my own software with read only access to my account. I didn't even want to transfer money anywhere, just get my transactions for accounting purposes. I was using ledger at the time and was getting tired of manually inputting everything into the journal.
I eventually discovered I would need to incorporate and beg the central bank for permission to touch the financial system.
I left a startup around 6 months ago. We were around 30 employees and we had working software and were starting to get some users. We couldn't get the banks to work with us. We were able to get some access through third-party companies and it sucked.
I went to a meeting a few years ago with a big investment company. They had a team of 30 people trying to figure out how to reliably read financial documents to get people's financial information to serve it back to them. At this startup we spent a ton of time doing similar things, and paying another company to read our user's financial documents so we could get their info.
My point is, even if you incorporated and begged I'm not sure you'd have success.
Welp. I actually tried it. Here's my experience.
I contacted my banks and got in touch with their managers and devs. They do have APIs. I wanted to use those to create my own software with read only access to my account. I didn't even want to transfer money anywhere, just get my transactions for accounting purposes. I was using ledger at the time and was getting tired of manually inputting everything into the journal.
I eventually discovered I would need to incorporate and beg the central bank for permission to touch the financial system.