[LRUG] Is anyone working with Open Banking providers?

[Patrick Gleeson]

Thanks for these responses - fantastically helpful!

On Thu, 25 Apr 2019 at 17:11, George Sheppard <george at fuzzmonkey.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hey Patrick,
>
> I work for 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
>
> 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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