[nr152522]

It’s is indeed very difficult to build a good dating experience. I was working on a project that essentially used your bank account (via OpenBanking) as a gatekeeper.

This approach enables you to analyse transaction data and filter potential matches based on similarity metrics, E.g. social, health, travel, financial. Once you had a similar score it would present present a set of profiles that you could choose to try and match.

The idea was to filter out the noise and find people with similar social standing, interests, etc and then allow the single to choose whom they find attractive.

Linking a bank account would also provide an extra layer of security in that the user has already provided a form of national identity. I’m not saying this completely guards against fraud, but it’s certainly more difficult than creating a fake email address.

Unfortunately, one of the major problems was convincing users to link their bank accounts, let alone attempting to build what essentially is a marketplace.

[nradov]

That should have been an obvious problem. How would want developer seriously think that would be an acceptable user experience?

[nr152522]

Well, it might have been obvious but it was certainly not a useless exercise. Some users were really interested and wanted to experiment with it.

Transaction data is read and never stored, just used to processing matches.

The flow was relatively simple, link an account during signup.

The regulation was hard and expensive.

[Double_a_92]

How do you casually link your bank account to some app? Is it common for banks to have safe readonly APIs or so in your country?

[nr152522]

Yes, take a look at the OBIE [0]. You are required to be registered/regulated as an appropriate 'Third Party Processor' (TPP) class, in this case an AISP.

Then you can use an API aggregator service such as SaltEdge, TrueLayer, Teller [1], etc. (I'm not associated with any of these). Or you can try to roll your own.

[0] - https://www.openbanking.org.uk/about-us/ [1] - https://www.truelayer.com https://www.saltedge.com https://www.teller.io