Financial companies should be required to have APIs

I know this is not Tiller’s fault… however, the whole value proposition for using Tiller is that I can get my transactions imported automatically. When I have to manually end up getting balances and transactions, it stops being super useful. No only that, but then I’ll have to manually remove duplicated transactions when the sync comes back on.

I even understand that most of the time this is not even Yodlee’s fault, but the financial institutions.

As a dev, I really wish there was some regulation requiring financial institutions to have APIs.

Nothing really to see here. Just a bit frustrated.

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Hi @dstcruz,

Thanks for this feedback, and I can totally understand your frustration.

Major banks in the U.S. are moving toward OAUTH based connections, which will remove much of the hassle of 2FA, and this is something that we and Yodlee will need to respond to in the coming months. We hope this will also reduce the likelihood of an outage by offering a more direct connection to the data vs a screen scraping mechanism that is very vulnerable to bringing when a bank updates their website layout.

Heather

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The fact that in 2020 the only way to get your data from most banks is still by screen scraping is unbelievable. Of course, it allows the banks to claim no liability given that “well, you gave your password away”, and it doesn’t require them to do any extra work to have their users “see” their data.

Screen scraping falls flat on its face with 2FA.

It is beyond hilarious that many of these very same banks allow you to add “external accounts” to your console so you can see all you accounts in one place (yup, looking at you Ally).

Sorry. Rant over.
Back to work.

What’s even more hilarious is that most of the major banks (not sure about Ally on that one) use Yodlee to add those external sites - same data provider we use :wink:

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Are there any major banks that are already using OAuth, or leading the way? I love Ally, but it’s been 29 days with no end in sight, and I’d be happy to move my money to a bank that’s moving towards actual security and allowing me to give trusted third-parties secure access to my transactions.

This problem existed long before Tiller.
This is a banking institution problem…but the good news is that what you are asking for is coming and the future is here…Real Time Payments, no more ACH. Say goodbye to float too.

https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp

@Eric,

I believe there are some major banks that are close to moving in this direction, and may have some beta implementations available, but our data provider will have to play catch up and then there is work to do on our side. We’re keeping our :eyes: on this issue and hope to be proactive rather than reactive when more banks start moving in this direction.

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