My side project: API access to your bank data
Hey!
Lately I've been learning about fintech and how banks operate and how that translates to the modern, digital world.
The conclusion: it's complicated, very bureaucratic and not fun at all.
However as a result I've built a small product that solves a particular need of mine: having access to my bank accounts through a very, very simple API.
As of now, it will only work for EU bank accounts as it relies on PSD2 for all connectivity. It costs 1€ per month and account and it's all prepaid and transparent. If you register now, you'll get free credit to try it out.
You can check it out here: https://banco.surf
There are free alternatives out there but they require you to deal with token refreshing and other techie bits. If you want to skip that, use https://banco.surf :)
My next step: Direct integration with Coda. I believe this could be a nice starting point to build your own personal finances tracking there. For the control freaks like me out there.
Comments and criticism very much welcome!
Isn't this plaid, but for banks in Europe?
Hey! Well, sort of. It's a tiny bit higher-level than that, as the token management and expiration in Plaid makes it harder to build "dumb" integrations with things like Integromat, Zapier or Google Sheets. I actually use a service similar to Plaid as a underlying provider.
My goal is to take something like Plaid, that requires quite a bit of technical expertise, and make it much usable for no-code or low-code applications. This is a first step.
That does seem like a good idea. I do agree that Zapier is one of those tools that is so helpful - especially in e-commerce space as lot of new D2C brands are coming up who don't have a big tech team and also do not have technical expertise as founders as that is not their core competence. Integrating with no code tool seems like a good idea. imo, security and trust worthy would be a big concern to factor in