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Are there any US banks that provide automated access to account data? (infosec.pub)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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I wasn't sure where to ask this, so please feel free to direct me to a different community if there's a good one for this question.

Are there any US banks that allow their clients programmatic access to their own data? As far as I'm aware, that's not really a thing in the US, but I might be willing to switch banks if there are any that provide access.

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[–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

what are you looking to do? I don't know of any consumer bank APIs but most equity and exchange brokerages will let you check account balances and make trades with an API key and credentials. Probably not initiate payments or transfers though. There are too many security risks involved for allowing that via a consumer-level API. There are also tools like Mint that store your credentials and can presumably access your data because they have corporate level agreements with the Financial institutions - I haven't used that and would not normally recommend a corporate-based solution like that personally, but it might work for your needs.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I explicitly don't want to provide full banking credentials to third parties.

    I'd like to get transactions to import into my budgeting app (Actual).

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I don't blame you re the third party - I wouldn't either. I generally download a transaction file periodically and import it locally using the app. I think you're going to find it difficult to find an API that will allow little people access, even though they are obviously happy to offer that to the big companies. Some of the brokerages have checking accounts and it might be possible to pull the transaction data via the brokers API (maybe), but whichever way you look at it, I suspect the most pragmatic solution is probably going to be a download/import of some kind.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 3 years ago

    I haven't seen a way to pull from, for example, Fidelity or Vanguard.

    I'm hoping some forward-thinking online bank is going to come along and offer clients readonly access to their own financial information. It seems like such a simple and logical thing, and yet nobody does it.

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