Hallo Cristian,
PSD2 does not help end users (account holders) to obtain their data from
the bank directly.
This is related to the political intention behind mandating the PSD-API
for (all?) EU banks.
There are certain agents in the financial market that profit from access
to customer data (and aggregation thereof). Think of fintech lender
companies that can check the credit worthiness of an applicant by
accessing their spending history from their main account via
standardized means. Those are the ones that profit from the API.
For private customers there is **absolutely no way** to access a bank
API directly. This is only open to (somewhat) trustworthy parties that
prove their proficiency in banking language, have some kind of
insurance, and put money into that process way above any regular monthly
salary... and are a registered _company_.
We had a discussion on aqbanking list about one certain fintech company
that plays kind of API proxy for interested developers / end users, at
the moment even for free. This may seem a wonderful prospect, accessing
all the banks' transaction data even from those that do not regularly
offer their customers any digital data, let alone structured information.
The consensus was - iirc - that developing an aqbanking interface to
that service helps mostly _their_ business model, not necessarily so
much the users, and everyone would pay with their banking data.
Depending on what that is worth to you, you might look into it - I did
not any further.
In case your Nordea account offers CSVs, you might better work with
those, in a half-automated fashion?
Lucky me has a german banking market that has a (rather national) data
access standard, FinTS, that mostly works quite well - nearly all
established checking account banks offer it. The newer fintechs mostly
do not have that access though - one more reason to not bank with them,
I imagine. Sorry this does not help with the swedish market.
Best regards
Anselm
Am 26.04.2023 um 23:01 schrieb Cristian Klein:
Hello,
TL;DR: Given infinite development bandwidth, can one even dream of using
PSD2 for Online Banking with GnuCash?
I wanted to improve visibility into my spendings (what do you know, it's
2023 😀) and wanted to try using GnuCash again ... after a 10-year break.
However, my life situation changed, and I no longer have the time (nor
patience) to manually enter all transactions into GnuCash. Therefore,
hearing about all the hype around PSD2, I thought maybe GnuCash already
supports pulling all transactions from my bank (Nordea, Sweden, EU).
Why don't I just hack a PSD2 backend for AqBanking?
So ... I read up on PSD2 and here is what I understood:
- It introduces a heck of a lot of acronyms.
- It essentially mandates an open API for access to my transaction
information.
- TPP = "Third Party Provider", i.e., the entity who -- upon my consent
-- gets access to my transaction info.
- XS2A = "Access to Account" is an API to essentially retrieve
transaction information.
- TPP needs to onboard at two levels:
- First, the TPP needs to get some kind of certificate ("QSealC eIDAS
Public certificate" -- in case anyone Googles this message) from the
National Financial Authority, e.g., BaFin in Germany,
Finansinspektionen in
Sweden, etc.
- Second, the TPP needs to get onboarded with each bank.
I learned these by reading the following documents:
-
https://medium.com/@mpn123/building-an-open-banking-access-to-account-xs2a-api-as-a-bank-or-aspsp-479f26b91a43
-
https://www.openbankingeurope.eu/media/1176/preta-obe-mg-001-002-psd2-xs2a-tpp-user-management-guide.pdf
-https://developer.nordeaopenbanking.com/pitching-form/compliance
Does this essentially mean that PSD2 and XS2A is only usable for accounting
software delivered as SaaS and useless for accounting software delivered as
desktop applications like GnuCash?
Any insight is appreciated.
Best,
_______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list
gnucash-devel@gnucash.org
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
