FinTech anyone?

[David Schwartz 430]

Some folks here might find this article interesting...

 

Axway: 52% of Americans have never heard of ‘open banking’

 

https://venturebeat.com/2021/08/22/axway-48-of-americans-have-never-heard-of-open-banking/

 

 

[dummzeuch 1517]

7 hours ago, David Schwartz said:

Some folks here might find this article interesting...

 

Axway: 52% of Americans have never heard of ‘open banking’

 

https://venturebeat.com/2021/08/22/axway-48-of-americans-have-never-heard-of-open-banking/

 

 

I never heard that term either, but I'm not American.

I heard of Fintech though, not sure what it means other than just another buzzword about making money with other people's money.

[Lars Fosdal 1793]

FinTech is an abused word.  

[Rollo62 539]

Thanks for pointing to this topic, I have not heard that term either.

After fastly checking, it seems to be somewhat in current discussions.

 

From my experience, building common banking API standards was always massively hindered by the banks and institutes itself in the past.

Did somebody or something stimulated the 3 brain cells of banking managers recently, towards 21st century

[David Schwartz 430]

11 hours ago, Rollo62 said:

Thanks for pointing to this topic, I have not heard that term either.

After fastly checking, it seems to be somewhat in current discussions.

 

From my experience, building common banking API standards was always massively hindered by the banks and institutes itself in the past.

Did somebody or something stimulated the 3 brain cells of banking managers recently, towards 21st century

ROTFLMAO! Yes, my thoughts exactly! I nearly choked when I read that article and had to check to see if it might have been published on April 1st as an April Fool's Joke! It appears to be legitimate.

 

I didn't really get much of an idea of what "Open Banking" really means from that article either, but one thing is undeniable: I've heard many reports that the bulk of venture capital investments have been going into so-called FinTech startups for the past 2-3 years, and big main-stream banks are actually getting nervous. For 15 years all they had to contend with was PayPal. Now there are dozens of smaller startups and even PayPal is having to adapt.

 

One very clear way to see the impact of this is that most of these online financial services are now adding ACH interfaces to their accounts, including PayPal. For years they kept saying, "We're not a bank!" but now that they offer ACH interfaces, it looks like they've given in, since you can now treat your PayPal account like a checking account. 

 

There's a startup called Plaid that just went public (or is about to) and they provide a fairly universal hub for connecting any two financial institutions together. Many banks are now using them rather than their own limited intra-bank services that let them limit who they work with. Plaid has a public API and it's fairly easy to work with.

 

For years, the big banks have been making most of their profits from abusive fees, and it's making a lot of people angry. Like the "cut-the-cable" people who are ditching cable TV because in spite of all their promises to offer more services at lower costs, they just keep raising prices and pulling popular channels out and putting them into separate tiers that cost more money. 

 

A lot of people are starting to thumb their noses at traditional banks, and one reason is because of all these little startup virtual banks that make "no fees!" one of their primary features. 

 

Congress has been trying to do stuff through the CFPB, but Trump gutted the CFPB and turned it from protecting consumers to protecting the profits of financial institutions. So costs and fees just keep going up and up. I just got an update from one of my store cards notifying me that late fees are now $40 and their minimum interest rate is now 24.9% on outstanding balances. Thanks, guys, it's been nice knowing you!

 

A large number of these FinTech startups are focused on helping consumers manage their finances. Traditional banks are very opaque and unpredictable, even to the point where they deliberately process things out-of-order to increase fees when your bank balance lets them do that to their advantage. Congress has tried to punish them for that, but they've figured out how to get around it anyway. You cannot manage things that are kept hidden and where the goal posts keep moving without your knowledge. So these FinTech startups are simply pushing transparency and simplicity, with no fees.

 

Just "no fees" alone can save lots of people $100-$200 PER MONTH! Most of these folks are already at the lower-end of the income spectrum, and they're tired of getting screwed by their bank which is supposed to be working to HELP them.

 

Anyway, the reason I posted this here is in case anybody might have some ideas for simple financial tracking apps that consumers might find helpful. There's an API for that now, and it doesn't require you to post a $100k fee to get started. (I'm pulling that number out of my ass, but banks have never wanted to let any random software devs access their data, and usually require big up-front fees to keep the riff-raff away. Plaid has opened the door for any of us to get into that market using Delphi or whatever other tools we want.)

[Lars Fosdal 1793]

Open banking is no joke - although I think the interpretation of the term varies with the country you are in.

Among other things, open banking allows the banks to hook into each other's APIs so that I, as a client of bank 1 and bank 2, open my page in the UI of bank 1, I can also see the account balances from my account(s) in bank 2. Typically, banking fees are fairly low here and there is no surcharge for this cross bank service.

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

32 minutes ago, Lars Fosdal said:

so that I, as a client of bank 1 and bank 2, open my page in the UI of bank 1, I can also see the account balances from my account(s) in bank 2

I wouldn't wish the bank 1 to know about my state in bank 2.

[Lars Fosdal 1793]

So, you want openness to go only in your favor? 😉

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

Well I don't care about openness at all unless I get any benefits from it 🙂 but if this openness will lead to data leakage or crap like "Oh, I see you have pretty penny on Bank1's deposit, now if you take a credit in Bank2 and credit card by Bank3 you could afford buying some cool stuff you absolutely definitely need just right now!!!" then I definitely don't want it

[Lars Fosdal 1793]

I haven't seen any of that. There are rules here which govern how the APIs can used.

I am not 100% certain, but it seems the APIs can only be accessed in the user's context, so the "other" bank doesn't actually "see" the numbers.

[Rollo62 539]

2 hours ago, Lars Fosdal said:

Typically, banking fees are fairly low here and there is no surcharge for this cross bank service.

In Germany banks silently rised their fees and conditions over the past years.

Only recently a judgement was mad, which allows bank customers to set back to their original conditions, when they opened the account.

Unfortunately this goes back unly until 2018, but at least this may count up to 200-300 EUR, or maybe more, depending on the use case.

I think it was an EU law that triggered the judgement.

 

Yes, I also think the fee's are to high ( for a fully automated process ).

The banks will get obsolete anyway in a few years, when all countries managed to launch "digital currenries", and the FED's take over.

 

I think no one needs these greedy imtermediate money grabbers anymore soon

( but then we're dependent from FED's and completely transparent, which opens a whole bunch of other nasty issues too  )

 

Edited August 31, 2021 by Rollo62

[Lars Fosdal 1793]

One great benefit of switching to a regulated digital currency is that it will make corruption more difficult.

[Rollo62 539]

1 hour ago, Lars Fosdal said:

One great benefit of switching to a regulated digital currency is that it will make corruption more difficult.

Yes, that is what they WANT you believe ....

I still prefer to have cash in the pocket.

 

Digital currency, not bound to any real value, allows the FED's and covernments to set its value at will.

This opens all doors to very ugly manipulations, control and value transfers, which is controlled from the government.

They tell us the story of crime and corruption, so that we forget to give it a second thought.

 

For example, the EU FED already has their hands already in sorts of directly supporting countries, governments, banks, etc.  ... WAIT:  What was the one and only task of the FED again ?

Yes, to ensure price stability (NOTHING ELSE).

 

[Lars Fosdal 1793]

It is hard to have stability without regulation.
Ref. crypto volatility.

[Rollo62 539]

It has good and bad sides, as always.

[Lars Fosdal 1793]

I prefer regulation over learning that my debt has increased 500% the last week.

[David Schwartz 430]

16 hours ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

I wouldn't wish the bank 1 to know about my state in bank 2.

So write your own UI. That's why I posted this ... not to evoke a bunch of complaints about what OTHERS might do, but so you can do it yourself.

 

Anyway, I don't think what you're suggesting is possible. It's more like how an IFRAME works. IFRAMEs have been around forever, and I've never heard anybody complaining that site owners have any possible way of dipping into an IFRAME data stream.

 

Plaid, for example, opens a popup window where you enter the data. The vendor saves a key that refers to your account info record on Plaid.

 

This is the same way many sites keep hold of references to credit cards, rather than the CC data itself. PCI regulations are pretty onerous here in America, and EU is even worse I hear.

 

So generally speaking, I think any outfit that tries snooping into your data served up by a 3rd-party would be violating a bunch of different laws, not the least of which would be the license they have to use the 3rd-party's API.

 

FWIW ... A couple of years ago, I set up one of my accounts to display a bunch of other balances. One of the accounts kept giving me error messages. The bank said they couldn't help because they don't have access to anything. The middle-man data provider (sort of like what Plaid does) said they couldn't help either. I finally had to go in and just delete the account. 

 

Basically, banks didn't think through this stuff very well, and came to different conclusions. Some decided they wanted to require a login each time data was pulled. Some issued a key that let the client get access to the data for a while. In this case. the query worked the first time, but I'm guessing the middle tier expected the key to mean they didn't need to login again. But the financial institution didn't play that game -- they wanted to see the login info every time a query was made.

 

I'm guessing this API has been fairly standardized so those kinds of things don't occur any more, but that's just a guess. I do know that I've had some problems with Plaid not finding banking institutions, but later on (a month or two later) they do. 

Edited September 1, 2021 by David Schwartz

[Guest]

On 8/30/2021 at 9:27 AM, Lars Fosdal said:

FinTech is an abused word.  

No, IMHO, FinTech is abusing the World.

[Guest]

On 8/31/2021 at 12:13 AM, David Schwartz said:

Anyway, the reason I posted this here is in case anybody might have some ideas for simple financial tracking apps that consumers might find helpful. There's an API for that now, and it doesn't require you to post a $100k fee to get started. (I'm pulling that number out of my ass, but banks have never wanted to let any random software devs access their data, and usually require big up-front fees to keep the riff-raff away. Plaid has opened the door for any of us to get into that market using Delphi or whatever other tools we want.)

I will NEVER use my skills to enable "a mench" to rip of their neighbour. Full stop. That is why i painfully RENT my apartment.

On 8/31/2021 at 9:40 AM, Lars Fosdal said:

So, you want openness to go only in your favor? 😉

Of couse!! The citizen should be the client. Not the shareholder or the actual clients (advertisers). Of course!!! This is basic human rights. I, ME, is the boss of my money, even though for Musk, my money is comparable to a cigarette but on the pavement. I'd like a bank or a "FinTech" or a service that values me a their customer. That are loyal to me first and foremost, not the owners. But if every shareholder are so much richer than me, i will never become a client, i'm a stakeholder, like on facebook. Sucks.

On 8/31/2021 at 9:03 AM, Lars Fosdal said:

Open banking is no joke - although I think the interpretation of the term varies with the country you are in.

Among other things, open banking allows the banks to hook into each other's APIs so that I, as a client of bank 1 and bank 2, open my page in the UI of bank 1, I can also see the account balances from my account(s) in bank 2. Typically, banking fees are fairly low here and there is no surcharge for this cross bank service.

Sure, but when an acne-ridden 20-y old tech guy get's a horn in your side... or your wife's side... it'll be like facebook 2014-2015. There's simply NO WAY to protect yourself if you jump on those business-models w/o some thought.

 

K, i'm at a bar atm.

On 8/31/2021 at 2:21 PM, Lars Fosdal said:

regulation

= fiat. Sad but true as of yet.

 

14 hours ago, David Schwartz said:

So write your own UI. That's why I posted this ... not to evoke a bunch of complaints about what OTHERS might do, but so you can do it yourself.

Again, i'll never allow my skills to be used by that peeps that rips off hard working people.

Do you actually think, that you can implement their APIs and from that "attack vector" change their business model?

You'll prolly end up in a circus-trial with some cancelling and some other base handling of human interests.

 

Sorry for being a killjoy.