Crawl Bank Accounts with the Ghost of Wesabe

http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/02/crawl-your-bank-account-with-w.php

by abraham • 15 years ago

116 20 15 years ago

joezydeco3• 15 years ago

Man, just a simple twitter bot that hit me when a transaction was over a certain amount, or perhaps over a certain distance away from home, would be awesome.

ryanhuff2• 15 years ago

This kind of feature is common in most banks that I have seen. Although instead of Twitter, its email and SMS.

joezydeco3• 15 years ago

Sure, my bank does it too. Finer-grained alerting could be useful, or possibly aggregate tracking ("You've spent more than $50 at Starbucks this month!"). Location awareness would be the most useful fraud prevention tool.

loveatlonglast• 15 years ago

Awesome. I'm at a startup now that could totally leverage this tech. Thanks!

6ren2• 15 years ago

Does anyone know if something like this is available for Australian banks?

I'd love to automate telegraphic transfer payments ("wiring" the money). Just need to poll for when the money arrives, and send out the receipt. Currently, you have to check manually.

That said, telegraphic transfer payments often to involve a fair bit of rigmarole, including negotiating prices, and even contractual terms in some cases. So maybe automating that bit wouldn't make much difference. Still, it would be great.

Joakal• 15 years ago

mint.com equivalent in Australia: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1154397

6ren2• 15 years ago

thanks!

there• 15 years ago

screen scraping should only really be needed for banks that don't support direct OFX access (or i suppose if your bank charges extra for direct access and you don't want to pay it).

OFX is an XML'ish protocol that all of the big banks and major banking software (MS Money, Quicken, Quickbooks, iBank, etc.) use to communicate when downloading transactions, posting checks, doing transfers, etc. it's what i'm using for downloading bank transactions in corduroy (http://corduroysite.com/) and i have hundreds of banks listed in there.

if you know a bank's OFX URL, you can just send it an OFX query and download transactions. it works the same for every bank and credit card company, and it's much quicker than the screen-scraping dance of establishing a session, logging in, clicking around, and then updating your scripts every time the website updates its interface.

here are some common OFX servers: http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Setting...

mattmiller• 15 years ago

Does it work for bill paying? Cable, water, gas and electric, mortgage companies? I think it would be awesome for have a way to pay all my bills from one interface.

ryanhuff2• 15 years ago

Most banks and credit unions have a (free) electronic bill pay integrated into their online banking that allow you to pay bills to the kinds of companies that you listed. The bank typically figures out whether to send them a physical check, or handle it electronically.

DevX101• 15 years ago

Someone here on HN who works in the industry mentioned OFX is notoriously unreliable.

troyk• 15 years ago

Awesome, was just getting ready to send in the yodlee NDA

ithayer• 15 years ago

you'll still need to send it. depending on the users you're supporting, and how, yodlee supports the long tail (some better, some worse), which would be difficult to support in a model like this.

alanstorm• 15 years ago

Half of me says awesome, while the other half is slightly-creeped-out that scammers no longer need to stop at "nah, writing scraping scripts for bank websites would be way too much work!".

swombat2• 15 years ago

Any support for UK banks? Specifically, LLoydsTSB, whose online interface is truly horrible... (and broken to boot)

patrickk2• 15 years ago

According to this link, LLoydsTSB is in QIF format:

http://www.accountz.com/accountz/online-bank-statement-downl...

A number of other UK banks there too.

swombat2• 15 years ago

Yeah. Their export functionality requires logging out and in between reports (apparently a "known bug" to be fixed in the "next release" which doesn't have a set date to it). I was hoping there's a way to just point something at Lloyds and have it suck out all the data for browsing outside of the "LloydsTSB experience"...

Crawl Bank Accounts with the Ghost of Wesabe

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