I would like to write my own read-only client(s) to pull my transactions from the bank and keep track of my spending. It would be possible to then feed this into other software (either that I write myself or that I can find and trust).
In the future, the goal is to actually initiate transfers to European bank accounts. For example an automatic transfer between savings accounts when the interest rates increase for one bank, or transfer from a savings account to a stock exchange instead of letting it sit on a stock exchange waiting to be invested.
It’s not entirely clear where to start as the banking system seems quite opaque and it feels like I’d have to get a job at the bank to understand how it works. Stock and crypto exchanges have APIs and sometimes even libraries, but banks?
Edit: no libs, but PSD2 is the keyword. Banks in the EU must(?) support open banking and provide APIs following that standard.
Thanks. Looks like I’ll need to read up and understand PSD2. Every bank seems to have their own implementation of the “standard”. At least some like DKB have a swagger.json that allows generating clients in many languages using https://openapi-generator.tech/
There doesn’t seem to be an all-encompassing lib for all banks that support PSD2 though (at least not that I can find). For my usecase, just having my bank support it is good enough.
I’ve done something similar to what you want to do. To avoid the issue with each bank having their own interpretation of PSD2 I ended up using an aggregation service. The few banks I looked at also had horrible APIs, which I didn’t really want to work with.
I picked GoCardless for aggregration since it’s free for simple transaction reading, but there are plenty of options available.