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Developer-Friendly Banks?
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."
Banking thrives on secrecy. That last thing they want are outsiders poking around with their data and protocols - lord know what you might find. You best bet would be to hit up the next bank president you come across on the golf course (private - not public). Barring that you could try dealing with one of the online banks like ING or perhaps a credit union?
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
... they're in it for the money.
Very few small clients will access their accounts in that way. As such, the service is priced with the large client in mind. They will not drop the fees for a small client because then the larger clients would insist that they drop the fees for them, too. Plus, it's a pain in the butt to administer the "small fish" they might pull in by lowering their fees.
Tell you what... You think this is a brilliant way to make money? Open your own bank. It's actually legal (and relatively easy) in this country. It's a good time to open a small bank, too - people are sick of the big banks. Find a backer and let them know that there's this underserved banking market out there. I'm sure you'll find plenty of takers if the idea is a good one.
But, in general, the main reason a banking service isn't offered to you is because the service isn't profitable enough to offer it to the market you're part of.
That is all.
Roll-out your own credit union for geeks. I'd be interested in a bank with the services you've described. I'm absolutely sick of big banks and their big fees for even minor infractions.
I do not know about stupid bank fees, but I recall that ACH is as you say extremely well documented. And there is a setup for a testing protocol built in. There is a spec book that I imagine is say $100 and freely available. If you were not particular about language or schedule or, what is the word, maybe track record, I figure you are talking $10k to do the client software from scratch. If you want it done this quarter in C++ by a name, say $200k. But no real cost analysis here. This was a long time ago, but I think I called my bank to see what sort of obstacles they would put up. As best I understood from a single conversation, there were no obstacles or fees. I suppose it might be relevant that there were personal relationships. For what it is worth this was a regional chain and if you want the name, email me.
I'll state at a high level that I work for a Credit Union, and there are a lot of us that believe in a model such as the one you are describing. Can I take this discussion in a slightly different direction? Rather than "where can I get this today", how about "what would you want from a service like this"? Reply with a list of features and describe the problem you are trying to solve.
Do you want to only access your own account, or offer a service to multiple customers of the financial institution?
Are you thinking along the lines of web services?
What type of transactions would you want - realtime (i.e. what's my account balance now) or batch (show me all transactions for the last 6 months)?
Are you talking about wire transfers, ACH, checks, etc?
Are you thinking a pull model, where you query into the data or a push model, where you are alerted when things happen?
Don't get dragged down in any pricing or cost at this point - just tell me in more detail what you want.
That's okay. There's a trick for that shit too.
By and large, yes - but it's not impossible. Of course, it really depends what you're looking to do. Many merchant processors allow you to move money in and out of your account(s) via ACH, and plenty of them have APIs with varying degrees of crappiness. You'll find that initiating the transfers tends to be fairly straightforward with most of them; it's the reconciliation of which transfers actually went through that's a pain in the ass (download a rather nonsenisical CSV file over FTP that's only available after a seemingly random time of day, rather than just pinging an API every few hours with a cron job).
I'm currently working with a company called Check Gateway which has a pretty good API at least by bank standards and staff that's quite helpful and willing to do stuff that a lot of other processors aren't comfortable with.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?