[sjtgraham]

It's takes banks 6-12 months to get anything into production. Also breaking APIs to thwart me has to compete with delivering new features to users. When they do change the contract, we know about it. We watch for new app releases, and proactively check.

[jorblumesea]

How do you guarantee SLA uptime with that model? You won't know of any breaking changes until it hits production and when it does you will have to fix it. This may be an easy 30 minute fix and you pause transactions, or it may be a 24 hour fix and your world is broken for "forever" in api standards where 99.9X% is generally standard uptime requirements.

It seems to be that any service that consumes private APIs is going to be inherently unstable, although I agree on the slow pace of work in the finance world.

Also, once they figure out your consuming their APIs there will be an arms race and possibly legal action.

[vidarh]

I'm not sure you need to guarantee an SLA for this to be attractive. E.g. I've badly wanted to get automated access to my statements for ages, but not had the time to work out an approach. I'm used to my bank (Barclays) being so insanely backwards, that if Teller's API suddenly tells me "sorry, broken because your bank are morons" and the API is down for a couple of days while they work around it, I'll blame my bank, not Teller.

For comparison: I've been unable to use Barclays own mobile app for about half of the last 4 years in chunks because their app seems to whitelist phones as they decide it's worth it. On a relatively random subset of my phones over the last 4 years, it just shuts down. No error, no nothing. Their support insists nothing is wrong. Nobody at Barclays appears to give a shit that they lock customers out. The Play store is full of thousands of one star reviews from people affected. My current phone took 6 months before it suddenly started working.

In other words: If you bank with Barclays, either you accept that you'll need to have a pinsentry device on standby when you get a new phone, or you'll stand a good chance of being unable to use their service for months on end.

When I signed up for Xero for my business account, I had to provide them with a document that they had to fax to Barclays to get them to pass on transaction info. It took about 10 days to get it enabled. If only I could get my personal statements electronically as easily (maybe Teller can finally solve that).

The banks have made sure peoples expectations of them is so low that any third party service that's remotely transparent is likely to find customers are very tolerant of bank problems.

I mean, the only reason I'm still with Barclays given the above is that most of the alternatives are shitty too, and I have locked in a mortgage rate with them that I "can't afford" to give up as long as the Bank of England rate is as low as it is (tracker rate that means I pay well below inflation).