[LRUG] Is anyone working with Open Banking providers?

[George Sheppard]

Hey Patrick,

I work for https://meetcleo.com <https://meetcleo.com/>, we have integrations with Plaid (US/CA but are launching in the UK soon..), SaltEdge, TrueLayer and a direct integration with Monzo. 

Firstly, getting an AISP license to access Open Banking data, at least in our case, was not trivial. It look around 9 months from start to finish. I think some aggregators offer a way around this where you can still access via OB apis without an AISP license but I’m not sure on the details.

We’ve been going for a couple of years so are using mainly using SaltEdge’s screen scraping based offerings in the UK. Most of the issues we’ve seen generally stem from the banks themselves rather than the third party aggregator. We’re not live with any Open Banking integrations currently but from what I’ve seen the OB offerings aren’t super reliable and the user experience can be poor. There are changes coming throughout this year to do with strong customer authentication requirements that may force our hand but we’re not in a rush to migrate away from screen scraping in the UK. Overall, pretty happy with SaltEdge - as a long term customer with a decent customer base of our own we’ve found the support pretty decent and the API is pretty straight forward, especially if you use their hosted credentials sharing screens. They’re working on wrapping the OB APIs but I’ve not looked into it that much.

We were going to launch TrueLayer for Monzo/Starling support to get around needing an AISP license. We then got our license so built direct integrations ourselves. There were quite a few issues on TrueLayer’s side with both of these banks which in-fairness, they did resolve but took longer than I’d have liked. We’ve not looked at their Open Banking offering at all.

Our product is live in the US & Canada, so we use Plaid for aggregating accounts in those territories. Generally pretty happy with the API although we’ve experienced pretty long support turnaround times in the past. They support ~ 10000 financial institutions, we’ve seen 4000+ and with the longer tail of bank the connections can be a bit flakey. I believe they’re working on this as a priority this year however. They’re going to launch in the UK shortly and are well funded with a great team, so imagine it will be solid option. 

Integrating with Monzo was not without some minor hiccups, the API is stable but has some undocumented quicks you have to figure out as you go.

Regardless of the channel, expect to spend more time than you’d like cleaning up the data. I’ve not seen an aggregator that has nailed this problem so far. I’m not sure what you need to do with the transaction data but at Cleo we’ve invested a significant amount of time to build parsing/categorisation logic so we can tell how a user is actually spending their money. The category/merchant data provided by the aggregators we have experience with are not good enough to rely on in our experience.

If you’re not on it already the Open Banking slack is a pretty useful resource http://signup.openbanking.space <http://signup.openbanking.space/>

Regards,

George

> On 25 Apr 2019, at 11:59, Patrick Gleeson <patrick.c.gleeson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi LRUG,
> 
> I'm working on a project at the moment that requires users to provide their recent bank transaction history. We'd like to avoid manual statement upload, so we're looking at services that provide a unified authentication flow and API to access this via Open Banking. There seem to be lots of companies offering services like this, such as Yapily, Tink, Salt Edge, LendingMetrics, TrueLayer, MoneyHub, Experian, Strands. We've tried a couple out, and our experience has been... not great. Lots of API downtime and error messages, patchy and inaccurate documentation etc. And conversations with developers who've tried other services have yielded similar stories of integration pain points. I get the sense lots of startups are scrambling for dominance in this space but using the 'move fast and break stuff' mantra, and support from the banks themselves is pretty patchy as well.
> 
> I'd love to hear if anyone has had any positive experiences with any provider of Open Banking integration (or any horror stories).
> 
> Best,
> 
> Patrick
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