API (Application Programming Interface)

#1

For awhile I have thought banks should offer an account API. This would be a brave step for the first mover but one where I think would open a whole world of new apps and ways of looking at banking. Independent developers could come up with things the bank didn’t even think of and who knows, the bank may end up buying out some of their creations? Trade Me springs to mind as a large NZ company who dragged their heels but eventually saw the light.

ASB has an API [1] but it’s publicly published spec implies it’s only usable for extracting public information from their website. [2]

I would assume there is something already available for the likes of Xero. But it could be so much more if opened up to other (trusted) companies. Right now, I can think of some really useful stuff I could do even if I could only access my own account.

I would be open to discussing this indepth with an appropriate person at the BNZ.

  1. https://developer.asb.co.nz/

  2. https://developer.asb.co.nz/documentation

#2

Hi @Michaelnz  this is certainly on our radar.  Effectively our front end applications all talk to an existing API, but we have not yet tuned and secured these for general dev community use.  But we certainly see benefit in viewing ourselves not just as a provider of internet banking services, but also as a platform for people to develop on.

I’d love to hear what you think you could do with it, so feel free to send me a direct message or drop some ideas on here.

#3

Hi @Nick I’m also interested in a banking API. The main use case I have at the moment is to regularly download recent transactions to feed into my personal finance app.  Obviously I can log in manually and download an OFX file, but I really want to automate the task so that my app is always up-to-date.

#4

Oh, and I’d really like to delegate that ability so that a service provider can run a personal finance app for me and I can authorise them to get my transaction history. For read-only access OAuth tokens might be sufficient, but TAuth sounds like an interesting initiative.

#5

Im also interested on this, specially into an exporting transaction API, or Message Queues.

Thanks

#6

In the meantime I found that the transactions are available on the following “API”

https://www.bnz.co.nz/ib/api/accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/transactions?startDate=YYYY-mm-DD&endDate=YYYY-mm-DD

However, we’ll need proper authentication methods to consume this.

Thanks,

#7

An API would be great!

It seems there are a couple of banks worldwide who provide one already: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bank%20api&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story

#8

Here is a video of an application that I built for this. https://www.youtube.com/embed/mWZU8ArPHG4 (Spanish)