Subscribe
Sign in
Teller API — A single API to connect your app with any bank's account
50
Replies
Imagine your app needs to connect to a user's bank.
You are pretty much screwed.
Banks have the worst public APIs out there… if they even have any.
If you want to offer your app to any kind of user you might as well give up. No way you will ever support all those bank APIs. Take your product idea. Either rip it apart, add 3 years of development time or wait for a shining hero/heroine to come.
Well… along comes @stevegraham - he had a similar problem with his last startup. He tried for years to get banks to work with him, only so he could build on top of their APIs.
After years of trying, he gave up going the official route…
He closed down his startup and went rogue.
If you can't get banks to officially work with you, you might as well go the other way round. He took every official bank iphone app out there and reversed their internal APIs. Teller is the wrapper on top of this.
Yep…
And it works!
It's not only more secure for your users to use it (read about TAuth in his blog) - it's also (and that is important) easier for you as a developer.
So here the FAQ:
Is this even legal?
Yes - his lawyers and the ones from the banks made sure. Several times. Stevie has enough angry lawyer letters of market incumbents to get through the next cold winters.
Is this really legal?
Yes - see above. This is not going away.
They have several private beta customers using it now for years.
It's now available for public beta - https://teller.io/
Can highly recommend! Huge fan of Stevie and Teller and watched them since their earliest days 🎉
This is an incredibly important/relevant space:
Yodlee, Finicity, and Plaid API are closing the gap.
We need more of these services to pop up so we cover more of the banks and turn them from analog to discrete.
Stevie if you need anything from me, don't hesitate to hit me up. This is going to be huge. Well done!
Thanks for hunting Teller @andreasklinger!
Hi everyone, really excited to open the Teller API beta to the public and to see what folks will do with it.
As Andreas said in his comment, the idea for Teller came from personal frustration. A few years ago after I left Twilio, I started to build a payments layer on top of the Faster Payments service in the UK. The only problem was banks do very well from credit card fees and so not a single bank wanted to facilitate access to Faster Payments because what I was building threatened that revenue. After being stonewalled by banks the project was essentially dead in the water. This all happened around the time that YC did a Startup School in London, which brought together hundreds of hackers, including most of the people I knew locally in tech. This meant that I had to tell this story dozens of times to everyone I knew. What I heard in response was two things, very clearly: "banks suck", and "I wish my bank account had an API". Drilling down further nearly everyone said they would pay for API access to their bank account and that they would switch banks to get one. I thought this was very compelling, but saw it as another situation of it going nowhere without the collaboration of the banks. Later on, on the bus ride home I realised that banks already exposed APIs to power their own apps. And that was the birth of Teller!
There is a blog post announcement here: https://blog.teller.io/2017/06/1...
I'll be here all day for questions.
@stevegraham Awesome! Have come across Teller before. Interested in using it but just had a few questions:
1) Are you scraping the data or using different tech?
2) Could you highlight the differences between Teller vs. TrueLayer in the UK and Plaid in the US?
Many thanks 🙌
@wholeearthweb Hi Max,
- We don't use screen-scraping technology. We reverse engineer each bank's mobile app APIs and integrate with those.
- AFIAK Truelayer isn't available yet. Plaid has much more coverage, but only US banks. I don't believe either of them offer live data, instead asynchronously fetching and caching data once a day. Neither of them offer payments APIs either, which we will be launching soon.
@stevegraham Thx. What does your pricing look like? And are we able to play around with this now already?
What's your timeline to expand the list of banks you work with?
@stevegraham @wholeearthweb This is Francesco from TrueLayer. We are actually available and currently supporting all the major banks in the UK.
We are integrating with bank's mobile and private APIs and offering real-time data (no caching or other similar limitations).
Ping me if you want to try out.
@stevegraham @andreasklinger This is awesome guys! Curious if you have heard of the PSD2 regulations passed in Europe.
Awesome idea! One question though: If the banks change their APIs how will your API be affected and how quickly can you respond?
@dusty_much Banks don't really change their APIs that much. Two breakages have happened in Teller's history: one bank changed the host name of their API endpoint, which was an instant fix; the other time was Barclays making some changes to their crypto specifically to thwart Teller. We didn't notice the breakage because Barclays made noises that they were interested in doing a proper 1st party deal and asked us to take the Barclays integration offline, which we did in good faith. They just used the time to make changes to their cryptography. Once we decided to break off and put Barclays back into production it took a few days to fix as they take significant steps to make their app resistant to tampering and reversing. We are expecting Barclays to make another big change soon purely to mess with us, this time we are expecting it!
Do you have a list of banks that you support?
Eg. I would like to have API for N26 (Germany), Berliner Sparkasse (Germany), Silicon Valley Bank (UK), Deutsche Bank (Germany), IdeaBank (Poland), BZWBK (Poland), Raiffeisen (Poland).
It's hard for me to believe that you support literally all of the banks?
Never met anyone like @stevegraham - total dedication to delivering Teller which will change banking for the better. The banking industry must support innovation for the benefit of customers.
@csaba_kissi I can answer this question better if you can be more specific. Generally speaking, all data is encrypted in flight and at rest. Developers must use client certificates to make API calls on accounts that are not their own. All user data is kept in an isolated area of an AWS VPC with no direct ingress possible.
Congratulations @stevegraham this is great. Wanted to understand what happens post PSD2 and CMA. Many experts believe that the push to stop unofficial solutions will begin as it undermines industry registry / consumer protection. Personally I would love to see how this plays out. Against slow PSD2 implementation, banks struggling w/ APIs as they try to pretend to be Tech cos which they are not VS. continual agile hacks by Teller
@williamukoh I mean any bank. We're not there yet, but that is where Teller is headed.
This is fantastic, means I can finally build a couple of hobby projects I had in mind.
This is awesome but the fact that banks are not on board means than any investment in building a serious product on the Teller platform carries a significant risk.
@ravsydney every huge company that has ever existed was at one point a significant risk :)
@stevegraham I was not probably clear - my point was not about the existence of risk but the ability to control/influence the outcomes when the banks are not on board. Your experience with Barclays appears to show it is currently a cat and mouse game. Anyone building a product on your platform has even less control or influence. As I said, the product is awesome - all the best.
@_gokatz Yes that is correct at the moment. It is a beta release. We will be expanding coverage as time goes on.
@kostyarypta Hi there. We reverse engineer each bank's mobile app, write our own client for its private API, normalize the differences and expose it to you via our JSON API.
@dailius_j would really appreciate a note with what you think is difficult and where we can improve. sg@teller.io :)
Commerce.js by Chec