Banks provide an API in Europe. In fact it's a legal requirement that's coming into force in 2019, and there are a lot of 'mobile-first' banks like Monzo and Revolut which make this entirely un-needed in the first place (providing spending exports, decent analytics, push notifications, etc etc).
Welcome to the future. Contact your local politician if you want to join us. Maybe also ask about chip and pin while you're at it!
> Since you're so far in the future, can you consider dragging Germany into it as well so I don't have to use cash everywhere I go?
I think that stems from an intense dislike of debt, specific to Germany more than anything.
Not sure why that's relevant to my comment though, or why being 'so far in the future' means 'credit cards everywhere at all times'.
Also the USA is still using cheques. They haven't even got to chip and pin yet. We are pretty much past that and onto contactless. How is that not futuristic compared to squiggling on a bit of paper to verify your identity?
"Also the USA is still using cheques. They haven't even got to chip and pin yet. We are pretty much past that and onto contactless."
I'm not sure what you're talking about. All my cards have chips, and I'm in the US. And for several years, I've been living in an apartment which takes direct bank transfers for rent rather than paper checks. Landlords in my experience have been the last holdouts that don't want to stop using checks. Contactless payment I don't use, but I know it exists in the US because I see signs when I check out.
Businesses still use a ton of checks, too. Even if they have direct deposit for employees there's an absurdly good chance that they're paying all their vendors with a paper check. I still don't fully understand why this is still the case, other than there not really being a compelling reason to change a system that works fine.
"until recently" meaning several years ago? Availability of terminals and support for the chip was what lagged, not the cards themselves (though that's a semantic argument in this case).
I would also somewhat argue that "most" cards are chip and signature, not chip and PIN. While in the US my cards all prefer PIN, it wasn't until I got out of the US that for some reason they all wanted a signature - talk about irony.
It's still far from ideal and not nearly as rigid as it is in Europe, but it's not quite as bad as you seem to think it is.
Is this really a characteristic of the card, rather than the reader? After all, my cards have pins. And often neither a pin nor a signature is required, although the chip is read. And when I buy something online, obviously the chip is not read.
Landlords have been the exception that demonstrates the rule, was my point.
Even landlords who are notoriously cheap and low-tech, are moving away. So called checking accounts don't give you a free checkbook any more, in my experience. I don't think I've had to wait for a person writing a check at the grocery store in the last 20 years.
I don't think some landlords requiring checks (in my case almost a decade ago) mean the USA hasn't moved away from paper checks in general.
People often generalize one group by the actions of a tiny fraction of its members, while comparing to another group characterized by the actions of the vast majority. It was particularly blatant here.
> Banks provide an API in Europe. In fact it's a legal requirement that's coming into force in 2019
That's simply not true. You're probably referring to PSD2, which is not an API in the sense that anyone technical would use the term. And it's not meant for you or I. The requirements for gaining PSD2 API access are insane, and at least in some areas require permission from the national bank. Which you won't get unless you're a large corp with big bucks and lots of insurance.
Sure, but as other users like Rjevski have pointed out the PSD2 API is going to be nearly impossible for the common person to use. Unless you want to become pretty much PCI-DSS certified.
So you're surprised or concerned that applications that wish to extract financial data abour consumers programmatically from their bank accounts need to conform to regulations regarding the storage of said data?
> API is going to be nearly impossible for the common person to use
Reading what you are replying to and making an argument against that rather than a hypothetical straw man that GP didn’t imply or mean will get you further.
More importantly, the original post, the one you responded to somewhat arrogantly, stated:
> This is very clever but makes me sad. It’s 2018 and the best, cleanest way of monitoring and storing my own transactions programmatically is by scraping an email.
It would seem that, outside of Germany, which has FinTS, the cleanest way to monitor my own transactions programmatically may well remain email scraping.
Looking here[0], it seems the future is fake, and the EU is no better than the US in this regard. Even after 2019, I'll still have to scrape bank's website and manual exports to get my own data out in usable format.
Banks provide an API in Europe. In fact it's a legal requirement that's coming into force in 2019, and there are a lot of 'mobile-first' banks like Monzo and Revolut which make this entirely un-needed in the first place (providing spending exports, decent analytics, push notifications, etc etc).
Welcome to the future. Contact your local politician if you want to join us. Maybe also ask about chip and pin while you're at it!