I wasn’t sure where to ask this, so please feel free to direct me to a different community if there’s a good one for this question.
Are there any US banks that allow their clients programmatic access to their own data? As far as I’m aware, that’s not really a thing in the US, but I might be willing to switch banks if there are any that provide access.
Some banks support the open financial exchange (OFX) protocol for fetching information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange
This is a list of some of the banks that are known to support it and their connection information from GnuCash, but it might be out if date:
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Talk:Setting_up_OFXDirectConnect
I, too, looked high and low for this. Switching credit unions every year or so when they’d stop offering access. I finally gave up and started using Plaid. They grab all transactions from all my various accounts for $2.16/mo and shove them into Moneydance. Not what you asked for, but it works.
I’m currently having my accounts send me alerts on as many transactions as possible and then programmatically reading them from my email. It works, basically, but it’s not perfect.
I do that too, but it is nice to not have to retype everything. For $2, well worth it.
what are you looking to do? I don’t know of any consumer bank APIs but most equity and exchange brokerages will let you check account balances and make trades with an API key and credentials. Probably not initiate payments or transfers though. There are too many security risks involved for allowing that via a consumer-level API. There are also tools like Mint that store your credentials and can presumably access your data because they have corporate level agreements with the Financial institutions - I haven’t used that and would not normally recommend a corporate-based solution like that personally, but it might work for your needs.
I explicitly don’t want to provide full banking credentials to third parties.
I’d like to get transactions to import into my budgeting app (Actual).
I don’t blame you re the third party - I wouldn’t either. I generally download a transaction file periodically and import it locally using the app. I think you’re going to find it difficult to find an API that will allow little people access, even though they are obviously happy to offer that to the big companies. Some of the brokerages have checking accounts and it might be possible to pull the transaction data via the brokers API (maybe), but whichever way you look at it, I suspect the most pragmatic solution is probably going to be a download/import of some kind.
I haven’t seen a way to pull from, for example, Fidelity or Vanguard.
I’m hoping some forward-thinking online bank is going to come along and offer clients readonly access to their own financial information. It seems like such a simple and logical thing, and yet nobody does it.
I’m hoping someone gives you a better answer, but in case no one does, here’s one potential path depending on how much work you’re willing to put into it.
For decades there has been a Personal Finance software package call Quicken. Even before online banking existed, Quicken offered a way for banks to export transaction and balance data for people to manage their finances. Rich online banking came along and largely negated this need for most folks, but the Quicken links and exports were already implemented in thousands of banks across the USA. Now, I imagine some have given up supporting Quicken exports, but a quick Google search shows there are Quicken users doing exports even today in 2023, so apparently its still a thing.
So to programmatic access:
I don’t know of any banks that have a straight up REST API you can hit, but with Quicken the linkage is there for exports you’d just have to wrap your own controls around it. Here’s one conversation about some advance end users (not programmers) doing basic automation. In one search I saw some references to some python packages, so maybe that’s path less kludgy.
It looks like that’s all about using browser automation to record the clicks needed to log into accounts and export the files? If Quicken could pull information directly, that would be better. It looks like Chase, for example, ended its OFX access last year. :/
My bank, bunq, allows that. I do remember people talking about using it as a US citizen. Might be worth looking into.
This looks really cool. Just spent a bunch of time looking into it and finally found this, though:
All personal plans are available in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine.
Doesn’t look like it’s available in the US.
Edit: Looks like they’re working on coming to the US, though! https://www.bunq.com/us
Signing up for updates. Thanks for the heads up!
Doesn’t look like it’s available in the US.
That’s a bummer. Hoping for you they get at it soon, though. I for one love it, since I barely have to move around money anymore between my different budgeting piggy banks anymore. It’s all automatic :D
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Plaid requires you to provide them (a third party) with your full-access banking credentials. I am running Actual.
