How an Open Standard API Could Revolutionize Banking

An anonymous reader writes: Open bank data will give us the freedom to access all banks in real time and from a single view, automatically calculating the best deals in complete transparency, which will be a significant step forward for social good and give people more control over their finances. Meanwhile, financial tech incubators, accelerators, and startups are creating a more experienced talent pool of developers ready to act upon these newly available assets. From the article: "The United Kingdom government has commissioned a study of the feasibility of UK banks giving customers the ability to share their transactional data with third parties via an open standard API. First mentioned alongside the autumn statement back in December, the chancellor has now outlined plans for a mandatory open banking API standard during the recent budget in March."

Comments

LMAO

[SeaFox]

Does the author serious thinks banks are going to adopt anything that is "a significant step forward for social good and give people more control over their finances". Most of the money they make is off people who can't control their finances effectively.

Keep in mind their entire business is moving numbers from one pile to another. Anything that keeps them in control of the access to these piles and information about them is a good thing to them.

Re:LMAO

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I presume you know that "mandatory" doesn't mean anything* when bankers of any ilk are involved?

*Actually, it means "tell me the rules, so I can get around them".

Re:LMAO

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the UK government has forced banks to do things for the good of the customer many times.

A similar example would be the "faster payments" system. It used to take about three days to make transfers between accounts, the government (well, regulator, but same thing really) told all of the banks in the UK to sort it out.We can now transfer money between accounts in less than 90mins, typically it's moved as fast as you can logon to another bank and check to see if it's there.

Other examples include making it easier to move accounts by moving DirectDebits (a system to allow bills to be paid directly electronically from bank accounts, without cheques) between different banks, which never used to be possible.

Re:LMAO

[rizole]

I can pay for good and services with my debit card. I can also make withdrawls and get cash back from 3rd parties. I can even withdraw money from competing banks cash points but I can't go into a different bank and pay money into an account with my debit card. The reason I can't do this is competition between banks (the kind lady behind the counter told me confidentially). This is not a technical problem. What I want to be able to do with my money is not my banks priority.

Best deals?

[abies]

I can understand benefits of standard, open API for automatic processing of orders for companies and various home-budget tools. But I don't get "automatically calculating the best deals in complete transparency". Do you really need a program, querying 100 of banks in realtime for the best place to have your current account _today_? And tomorrow you are going to switch, because international transfers over there are half cent cheaper?
API for transactions - sure yes. But API for bank offers metadata? Isn't it bit too much?

The banking industry will love this

[houghi]

They will love it, because what they want is transparency and more competition, because that is what banks want: to give you the ability to compare.

Oh wait, they don't. They will fight this with everything they have and they have money.

Re:Great!

[Chrisq]

Because I really want advertisers and the NSA/IRS knowing even more about my financial habits. Yay for openness!

You think they don't already?

How this could be awesome.

[queazocotal]

Imagine that instead of having your shitty bank app or website, or in many cases, several shitty bank apps or websites, you had one unified app that accessed that consistent API across banks, and presented a nice interface.

Transfer from bank 1s savings account on the right day to pay your incoming card bill from bank 2. ...
Unified balance and tracking of upcoming bills - warning you if you're about to go into the red with a hypothetical purchase in a week and your forecast income, ...

And yes - security is an obvious issue, and there need to be strict permissions.

Re:Sounds good to me

[dmbasso]

I feel your pain... I left my previous bank because they "improved" the UI with a brain dead design, that required pixel hunting and clicking "next page" until all the records had been displayed for the selected month before being allowed to save as CSV. Btw, the bank I'm talking about is the CGD of Portugal (Caixa Geral de Depositos). Fuck you CGD, please slowly die in a fire.

I made a small script with xdotool to dump all my data before I switched to another bank. It was ugly, but did the job.

Re:Sounds good to me

[arglebargle_xiv]

An OAuth2 + REST API to just grab this data would be very useful.

Yeah, the banks are going to allow this. And big pharma will make make medicine freely available for the good of all mankind, the music industry will distribute MP3s of all their artists for free over BitTorrent, and Microsoft will cede the desktop to Linux. Any minute now.

Sounds like hype to me

[tomhath]

Through a self-perpetuating ecosystem of developers, the banks will continue to gather high-value data from customers through third party integration.

I read the article but don't really understand what a "self-perpetuating ecosystem of developers" would do for me. It sounds like they're planning to breed.