[HN Gopher] Nordigen: Free banking data and premium insights
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       Nordigen: Free banking data and premium insights
        
       Author : rmesters
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2021-03-07 14:13 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nordigen.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nordigen.com)
        
       | joe_91 wrote:
       | Really great to see alternatives to plaid! A few years ago I
       | looked to setup an online finance tracker for personal finance
       | and eventually dropped the idea of connecting with Banks using
       | Plaid or Salt due to the excessive costs - especially for just a
       | side project idea.
       | 
       | Hopefully banks the world over will start to standardise their
       | API's and we'll have access to more and more third party apps
       | which can help people with their finances!
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | > Hopefully banks the world over will start to standardise
         | their API's and we'll have access to more and more third party
         | apps which can help people with their finances!
         | 
         | I got good news for you, Europe has already been working on a
         | solution for this for a long time, finally coming to fruition
         | now. Nordigen seems to be using PSD2 as well.
         | 
         | More info:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive
        
           | dastx wrote:
           | Except in reality there is no standardisation, and everyone's
           | API is different. Making it that much harder to actually
           | integrate. Still, having _an_ API is way better than no API.
        
         | joe_91 wrote:
         | Oh just an FYI - I'm getting a 403 error when trying to
         | subscribe to your mailing list, it looks like a CSRF error:
         | "CSRF verification failed. Request aborted."
        
         | rmesters wrote:
         | UK and Europe has already done this. Australia, Saudi Arabia,
         | Brazil and Japan are all working towards this. It's happening.
        
         | omeze wrote:
         | FYI - Plaid is free for 100 linked accounts (and has been since
         | inception) so it should work for personal use cases.
         | 
         | Disclaimer: used to work there
        
       | vhanda wrote:
       | I would love to use this for my personal bank accounts so that I
       | can setup custom scripts / alerts, but I'm uncomfortable not
       | paying for this. At that point I feel like the product, and even
       | after reading your entire privacy policy, I'm still on the fence.
       | 
       | Especially with this part -
       | 
       | "Nordigen may also provide personal data to companies that
       | process personal data on behalf of Nordigen such as marketing
       | service providers. Nordigen will be responsible for the correct
       | processing of Your personal data."
        
       | capableweb wrote:
       | Looks cool and all, would like to be able to use. Bit bothered
       | that it's a Show HN since you can't actually try it out, this is
       | just asking you to sign up to a mailing list or contact sales
       | basically. This is funny because you have two buttons as the call
       | to action, "Get Free Access" and "Contact Sales". Both of them
       | leads you to having to wait for them to contact you back.
       | 
       | Having a list of supported banks upfront would be nice as well.
        
         | rmesters wrote:
         | Thanks - super valuable feedback. A fully self-service
         | onboarding is on the way. I get the frustration of having to
         | wait, we're working on that.
        
           | mellosouls wrote:
           | I think you haven't understood - it's a requirement of ShowHN
           | that the service is readily useable for free try-outs.
           | 
           | Sign up pages are not eligible.
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
           | 
           | Regardless, best wishes with the project, sincerely.
        
             | dang wrote:
             | I've taken Show HN out of the title now. Thanks.
        
           | ganzuul wrote:
           | Consider when you try to build momentum. I for one won't be
           | checking back until you make the news again.
        
       | cromka wrote:
       | One of the maintainers of KMyMoney, an open-source personal
       | finance software. We looked into
       | (https://invent.kde.org/office/kmymoney/-/issues/21) leveraging
       | one of the 3rd party aggregators like yours to allow users access
       | their data. The conclusion was that being an open-source software
       | was a no-no for all of them, unless we were willing to sign our
       | binaries with certificates (that the aggregators require) and
       | distribute the software as such. All of that obviously aside from
       | the cost of the service itself.
       | 
       | Do you see if this could be made possible with Nordigen?
        
       | klausjensen wrote:
       | How can I see a list of banks I can actually connect to in each
       | country?
       | 
       | Ps. This looks great, and I will try it out, if my bank in
       | Denmark supports it/is supported. :)
        
         | rmesters wrote:
         | There's a good chance we support your bank in Denmark. We
         | support a good bunch of banks in DK already.
        
           | alexchamberlain wrote:
           | That doesn't actually answer the question: where is the list
           | of supported banks published?
        
       | neogodless wrote:
       | Minor complaint - went to mouse up to click on pricing and I
       | suppose my cursor went out of the viewing window, and I got an
       | annoying "wait don't leave" pop-up. I'm sure this is
       | _intentional_ and perhaps it 's better for your business to have
       | it, but I personally find it a good reason to close the tab.
       | 
       | Perhaps add a tiny waiting period when the mouse leaves in case
       | it is accidental and not aimed at hitting the "x"?
        
       | nailer wrote:
       | FYI https://teller.io has been operating in Europe for over six
       | years now giving third parties access to the private banking APIs
       | (not the cut down PSD2 equivalents), long before they opened in
       | the US.
        
         | sails wrote:
         | First time coming across them after following
         | Plaid/Truelayer/Nordigen for a while. Thanks!
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | If they have been operating for six years, they really went all
         | the way out on minimalism. Their website barely have any
         | information about how it works and what are the requirements.
         | List of supported countries and banks is also absent. Is
         | https://teller.io/ maybe not the main page?
        
       | 1f60c wrote:
       | In Europe, this isn't needed because of PSD2.
        
         | rmesters wrote:
         | Fair point. But Europe is also a bit of a mess - 6,000 banks
         | with unique banking APIs. And the large open banking incumbents
         | are charging for access to banking data that's available via
         | PSD2 for free. We're trying to make it a little less messy, by
         | providing free access to data that's actually free (it's weird
         | how it's a thing, I know).
        
       | stevesimmons wrote:
       | I guess this is really a question to @rmesters, who indicated in
       | a reply that he is CEO of Nordigen.
       | 
       | Can you explain what has changed versus the standard product
       | Nordigen had in the market around 2 years ago? I remember having
       | sales calls with Nordigen in October 2019.
        
         | rmesters wrote:
         | Today Nordigen offers Free access to banking data and Premium
         | data insights as a service. For reference:
         | https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/01/nordigen-introduces-free-e...
         | In 2019, we only offered Premium banking data insights as a
         | service (no account aggregation functionality).
        
       | dastx wrote:
       | Your privacy policy seem quite vague. Do you sell transactional
       | data? Anonymised or not? I've been looking for an alternative to
       | Yodlee, but they all seem to be selling the scraped data in the
       | background.
        
         | rmesters wrote:
         | We're regulated by GDPR (Europe's data privacy law), which is
         | super strict about data.
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | Sure, but nothing in GDPR forbids you to sell data, as long
           | as you're up front about it and ask for permission. Not
           | answering "Do you sell transactional data? Anonymised or
           | not?" with a clear yes or no is a bit worrying.
        
           | dastx wrote:
           | Since you're Europe based, this was implied. As mentioned by
           | a sibling comment, this doesn't mean you don't sell data.
           | Your vague reply seems to imply that you do end up selling
           | this data. I guess this kind of makes sense, considering
           | selling the data probably makes you a lot more money than the
           | EUR0.50 per month.
        
             | rmesters wrote:
             | We don't sell the data. Our business model is to help
             | developers/businesses access banking data (with end-user
             | consent) and make sense of the banking data to power their
             | apps.
        
       | devops000 wrote:
       | I think the color palette of your website it not looks great.I
       | would have use softer color (eg. Stripe, ModernTreasury etc.)
        
       | alexchamberlain wrote:
       | How does this compare to others, such as Truelayer?
        
         | rmesters wrote:
         | CEO/co-founder of Nordigen here. We plug in to the same Open
         | APIs as Truelayer, but we don't charge for access to banking
         | data. We only charge for value-adding data services (e.g.
         | Transaction Categorisation, Credit Insights) that help
         | developers get more value from banking data.
        
           | sails wrote:
           | Truelayer cost structure is quite low, order of PS400 per
           | month if I recall correctly, which I often thought was
           | relatively cheap. I wonder if the value proposition of free
           | vs PS400 is compelling enough. How does Truelayer cost scale
           | up?
           | 
           | A minor thought on how you could improve on the service
           | Truelayer offers: It requires some dev work to setup the auth
           | callback, requires hosting a server etc. This is perhaps
           | because the product is more enterprise than hacker, but this
           | is more work than say Codat that is providing the same
           | service for accounting systems, without the need to host our
           | own auth service.
        
       | croes wrote:
       | FYI: LinkedIn or Github account needed
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-07 23:03 UTC)