It's not really the banks' fault. They're all stuck leasing expensive information systems from entrenched third-party technology shops. They don't have software development dollars and they are extremely risk averse, to a paranoid degree. Thank the regulatory environment for that (state and federal).

Companies like Moov.io are trying to crack open this space and provide the levels of integration we see in other industries.

But it's really hard and slow.

At the time I was using ledger for personal accounting. Ledger is amazing and incredibly flexible. Writing the journals with detailed financial data is way too time consuming though.

I tried to write software to pull this data from the banks. Got in touch with the managers at my bank and everything, they even referred me to their devs. I just needed read only access to my own bank account.

I eventually discovered I needed permission from the goddamn central bank to do this.

I also tried to integrate with my government's electronic consumer receipt systems. The idea was I'd scan the receipt with my phone or laptop camera and it'd download the data and automatically generate a detailed ledger journal entry with individual postings and metadata for every product I purchased. This was going to save me so much time it's not even funny.

I discovered I had to create a corporation to even ask the government for API access to my own data.

There's PSD2 in the EU (or Eurozone? Not sure actually). Basically forces banks to open common APIs to encourage interopability and competition. However, it's not aimed at users but rather at companies in fintech building applications.

Some banks (Bunq comes to mind) offer APIs to their customers for direct use, but most don't. The reason is obviously security. People still fall for phishing, people still give fake bank staff their access codes on the phone. Giving normal users a way to have API access to their bank account would be disastrous for many of those users.

Now, it would be nice if things like PSD2 were a little more accessible and transparent. Currently you need permission from an institution like The National Bank to gain access. It's expensive and bureaucratic.

Banks are pretty good at not losing data. They're also pretty good at layered security.

I mean there's fraud and theft on all levels, but collapse-level events don't come from "a hack or basic data loss". They come from political incompetence and large scale economic events.

Sometimes not moving fast and not breaking things has its advantages.

Everything is also constantly regulated to death (and not the good kind) and banks wait until the very last day (even when regulations were passed at EU-level 6 years (!!) ago) and you then need to rush implementing it in the last month.

After working there for a few years now it's hard to trust any bank. Better not think too hard about it...

Also there's a bunch of really annoying and expensive processes for rich people to get their money back after an error, so they don't see any problem.

Is this a UK thing? I've been searching for something like Mint/Quicken in the EU and haven't found anything worthwhile because there doesn't seem to be a standard for budgeting apps to connect to banks.