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."

Comments

Re:"Friendly" and "Bank" in the same sentence?

[roman_mir]

No no no, friendly bank is the one that does not hit you on the head with a baseball bat more than 3 times after having its way with you. You don't want them to use the lube, they use the same stuff that kills the engines on cars in the 'cash for clunkers' program for that.

Use a swissbank

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi
just switch to a bank in switzerland

foreign countries - no problem
electronic transfer - no problem
APIs - no problem
black money :-) no problem. police comes afterwards
off shore banking ;-) no problem, all you need is a boat to get to the island

no really, we are keeping up to date with technology.

The swiss.