This is an awesome idea. The only thing I log in to my account is to literally run this in my head a couple of times a month. I usually have a couple of active credit cards with different due dates on them so this is at least annoying to keep track of.

    safe_margin = rent + food + 500
    emergency_fund_bal = monthly_salary * 3

    // pay all credit cards if I can
    sort(my_credit_cards, apr) 
    for (cc in my_credit_cards) {
      if (cc.statement_bal == 0 || cc.paid) skip
      if (checking.bal - cc.statement_bal - safe_margin >= 0) {
        pay(to=cc, from=checking, amount=cc.statement_bal);
        cc.paid = 1
      } else if (checking.balance > cc.min_pay)  {
        pay(to=cc, from=checking, amount=cc.min_pay)
      }
    }

    // refill the emergency funds if needed and can
    if (savings.bal < emergency_fund_bal && checking.bal > safe_margin) {
      transfer(from=checking, to=checking, 
        amount=min(
          emergency_fund_bal - savings.bal, 
          checking.bal - safe_margin)
       )
    }

    // invest the rest
    if (checking.bal > safe_margin) {
      invest(checking.bal - safe_margin)
    }

Glad I'm not the only one that'd be happy to have a proper api for their bank.

In Europe to upcoming PSD2 directive basically requires banks to expose the api. In the mean time I'm abusing JSON/HTTP api my bank has built for their own RWD app...

Founder here - let me know if you have any questions! More details at https://root.co.za/

Fellow saffer here. I signed up for your beta yesterday and I am quite excited, I think this has the potential to become an absolutely amazing product.

As a developer, do you plan on having a market/app store where I can sell my "apps" to other root users?

Yes, it's definitely part of the plan. As you can imagine there are a few interesting security challenges etc to solve, but we're working hard on it.

Fellow South African here. How do I get in on the closed beta?

You can sign up to the waiting list at https://root.co.za/ We'll be sending more details to people on that list soon.

As a fintech developer super keen to get involved in this, and finally an excuse to learn Javascript. Fingers crossed.

This is great. I will definitely be using this soon. How long will it be before I can accept payments?

The account supports EFT payments already

Are there any mechanisms in place to prevent developers from shooting themselves in the foot, e.g. unintentionally allowing access to their sensitive financial information or transferring money to someone because there's a bug in their code?

There are two ways we're dealing with that at the moment. 1) A sandbox mode to test code on, that simulates transactions without moving real money 2) The idea of "pockets", so you can attach code to a specific ring-fenced pool of money

Hi malanj,

Can you point on some use cases this may serve? Is the intention to allow mobile app developers to create e-wallet type apps. for the bank account? Or perhaps hook it up to e-assisstant such as Alexa?

We've actually done an Amazon Echo integration :-) So you can do things like check balance, or send money to a predefined set of contacts etc.

A lot of the use-cases getting interest seem to be related to spending management. E.g. company cards for everyone in a team that integrates with Slack. So when you spend on the card it notifies you, and asks you to submit the payment receipt directly on Slack.

- Hey, Echo, send two thousand rand to Mike

- Ok, sending twenty thousand rand to Mike

- Noooooooo! Two thousand

- Ok, also sending twenty thousand to Nolan

The first thing I thought of when seeing this was giving a card to each team member which allows for small purchases at specific partnered businesses - e.g. expensing lunch outings without most of the paperwork.

hey, this sounds like a really interesting service! I have a question - why did you choose to go for hosted JavaScript instead of an API/webhooks combination?

Hey beaconstudios, (other co-founder here), both are available. The hosted JS is to easily/quickly prototype small solutions without spinning up a separate server. We have webhooks for transactions and RESTful APIs as well :)

oh, brilliant!

I also signed up. I'm pretty excited to try it out. Would you be able to use root as a fully fledged bank account? Or is it not really meant for that?

Is this service available to other countries as well?

Not at the moment unfortunately

I'm with ABSA and FnB. Will it initially be only for Standard Bank customers or will you support other banks?

Hi sgt, Root will be available to all developers in South Africa, not locked to SB clients :)

And for the rest of the world? I always wanted such a kind of service, can't wait to use it.

This is very exciting. In the EU the fintech revolution is also banging the gates, as in 2018 all banks must support a standard protocol, if I recall correctly.

It's called Psd2, strugling to find a good article about it but TLDR; Banks has to have an open api for payments and to check account statuses.

It's generally a "read only" view, i.e. you can get account info etc. Root is a "write" API. So you can actually create and modify transactions.

In the legislation banks has to provide a way to inititate transactions. So its not only to view data.

Didn't know that ! It may explain why french bank (like société générale) are starting to offer a way to check other french bank account from their mobile app/website

" Banks has to have an open api" are you sure about that ? I thought there was some criteria to be able to use these APIs

Yes but account owner or user will be able to give permission for access to his banking data. So you will be able to use your fav accounting app to fetch data directly from account without doing csv export or hacking something around.

In Germany we have DATEV, which is a company doing exacly that.

In France we have "Bankin" and other apps, but the problem is, since banks don't offer APIs at all, all these apps (called "Aggregators" in fintech language) are doing web scraping to pull the user datas.

I think the difference is that you can use the APIs of any bank as long as you fulfill some standard criteria; each bank can't set their own, or pick and choose who can "partner" with them to use the APIs. At least, that's my understanding.

My company Teller, https://teller.io/ has transactional banking APIs with the UK banks in production today. It'll be coming out of beta soon and I'll do a Show HN at the time but feel free to shoot me any questions at sg@teller.io (don't want hijack Root's thread, awesome work folks!)

I would love something like this for personal use, so I can share my bank account with my family and control their spending and behavior.

I mean, assuming you can give out cards linked to said account, to discern who is using the account. That'd be incredibly useful. I used Google Wallet for this previously, and now use Simple, but it'd be nice to not have to approve requests and instead implement some logic to do so.

If anyone working for Simple sees this: get on this! I'd move from my main bank account to entirely Simple just for this functionality.

That'll actually be one of the key use-cases for Root I think.

E.g. We've had people who want a card for their spouse, and then whenever one of them spends money, it alerts the other one so that they can sync budgets.

That's awesome! I just wish I could use Root then, with a state-side available bank.

Awesome concept!! I've signed up for the beta and having worked for SBSA, I'm proud that they're on the forefront of some this with this potential.

I'm keen to see what sort of use cases people come up with.

> overpaid German fintech ecosystem

In what sense is the German fintech ecosystem overpaid? Don't you earn less than the UK and US?

Maybe "overpaid" is the wrong term. I think that VC capital allocation in Berlin is skewed in favor of fintech investments, where most people are setting up some part of the banking ecosystem into their own app and most of them fail hard w/ product market fit even though they got great budgets compared to other b2c industries like eSports etc.

You mean why N26 doesn't do that already ?

Yes, now that N26 is a bank they could allow us to create artificial IBAN and CC numbers so every one of my amazon/netflix accounts has their unique payment details.

Apart from N26 and Wirecard most German fintech is bullshit talkers.

AWESOME , nice to South Africans