[rufugee]

First I've heard about Plaid and Quovo. These services seem to be targeted at a developer interested in developing products for others.

I really wish someone would come out with an API service targeted towards someone who would like to manage and query their portfolio of accounts with code. I have tried time and time again to use things like Mint or Quicken to have a consolidated view of my accounts, but invariably I find things that really suck about the service. I'd rather hack together a set of scripts and do it that way, but where to go for the actual access (aside from manually downloading .obx files).

[foodstances]

I use Plaid for my own bank account access, which I used to replace my own OFX code because my banks kept randomly breaking their OFX interfaces.

Plaid was fine with creating a developer account for just a few bank accounts, they didn't have any minimum or anything.

[rufugee]

Thanks. I'll give it a shot. Any useful scripts you'd care to share?

One thing I ran into quickly when parsing my own bank's OFX was the truncation of the payee field, which made it extremely difficult to identify certain transactions. For example, I might get coffee at a Starbucks, but it would show up in the bank export as "STORE93423 CA LA STAR". I never determined if this was a limitation of the bank's software or simply that OFX didn't allow for enough characters. It'll be interesting to see if Plaid solves this.

[macandcheese]

Personal Capital is pretty good - their investment service is pretty overpriced, but their free portfolio management tools work most of the time, provide great graphing, and seem to handle all my accounts easily across a variety of banks.

[JohnnyMneunomic]

Would you pay for access to this API service?

[rufugee]

Provided it were priced reasonably...absolutely.