Comments on: Your bank has a REST API now (shhh! — don't tell them)

By: jjray

jjray — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:00:48 +0000

“The reason we provide the API in the format we do is that we want to build up a large database of transactions … .” I take it then that tradeoff for use of the API is turning over the data to you. Privacy issue. From reading your privacy statement, I guess the response is that the financial data is not individually identifiable in that your company only has user name and email address. But surely you also have IP address and probably account numbers as well. That’s enough individually identifiable data to tie the financial acct info back to a user. Every service has a cost of some sort. Perhaps that’s a fair tradeoff.

By: Who owns your bank transaction data? « Rowan Simpson

Who owns your bank transaction data? « Rowan Simpson — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 09:07:09 +0000

[...] Their REST API for bank transaction data; and [...]

By: How to do almost anything online « Gurgle Italy (Children of a Lesser God)

How to do almost anything online « Gurgle Italy (Children of a Lesser God) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:43:23 +0000

[...] Wesabe. Wesabe is best in its class, allowing access to bank accounts and credit cards so that you can pay one-off or repeating bills. Use the new REST API for custom apps. [...]

By: friendly developer

friendly developer — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:02:54 +0000

Thank you for a very helpful answer. Keep up the great work!

By: Marc Hedlund

Marc Hedlund — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:58:19 +0000

Hey, friendly,

The API does currently require you to have a full Wesabe account, but we may modify this in the future. The reason we provide the API in the format we do is that we want to build up a large database of transactions so that we can make recommendations to consumers about where they’ll get the best values. So, it’s in our interest to have the data filtered through the Wesabe site. We also think it’s in your interest, since we clean up the data substantially, both algorithmically (since banks tend to put out data in a bunch of irregular formats), and through community editing (since we translate from bank back-end names like “WHLE FDS BERKELY 423220 G” to human names like “Whole Foods” when a quorum of users agree that that edit is the right edit).

However, if you’re not comfortable with that, it’s not a requirement, and you can use our (open source) Firefox Uploader to get data out of your bank and do whatever you want with it. (See http://blog.wesabe.com/index.php/2007/07/25/the-wesabe-firefox-uploader/ for more info.) We completely support you have full, free, easy access to your data whether through our site or just using our tools.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

By: friendly developer

friendly developer — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:15:34 +0000

This is really cool. I have a question. You wrote:

“As a result, we’re not just providing an API for our own site, but also for all the bank and credit card sites that Wesabe supports, as well.”

Does this mean I could use your APIs to custom write an application that runs on my machine which would leverage your platform to pull data directly to my client? Or does you API work in such a way that I would have to create a Wesabe account, and use the API to get my data filtered through my Wesabe account? As far as I can tell from docs, that is the case.

However, your quote implied to me that there were now APIs for the banks which I could use.

If your API supports the use case I am describing, an example would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

By: Gene Blishen

Gene Blishen — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:47:26 +0000

This looks very interesting. I have passed this info onto IT to look at. We just finnished a Soap/XML bridge so we could entertain something like this. See you in Seattle Marc.

By: Damien

Damien — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 20:37:32 +0000

Nice! I’ve been looking for something like this for a while!

But about finding out which banks are supported, I’ve signed up but still don’t know where to find this information. When I try to add an account for my bank (Chase), it just tells me “Go to your bank’s or credit card’s web site. Download an account statement to your computer.” I guess my bank is not supported then? If I need to download the Wesabe Uploader just to find out this information, that stinks since I’m running Linux. =/

Anyways, if Chase is not one of the supported banks, it would be awesome if the code was made open source and anyone could contribute to add their bank to the wesabe API. Seems like that could be a win/win situation, no?

By: Jeremy Zawodny

Jeremy Zawodny — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:51:27 +0000

Oooh! This may be what finally motivates me to sign up and spend some time with the service. Nice job, guys!

By: Michael Chermside

Michael Chermside — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:56:16 +0000

I agree with Mr eel: it would be nice to have a list of supported institutions. That being said, I *do* intend to check out Wesabe sometime soon — it sounds worth investigating.