Data Connector: GoCardless

[iloabn]

GoCardless supports (according to them) 2500+ banks across the EU+UK.
It seemed like a worthwhile API to investigate since their free tier offers 50 active connections.

More information can be found here: Bank Account Data | GoCardless

Disclaimer: I have never worked with the company and have no experience with the API. I know it supports my bank though.

[joehoyle]

FWIW I have written an app that uses gocardless. The api is ok, if a little clunky. There's some level of duedil to get your application published though

[Shpigford]

In theory everyone would just sign up for their own API account and wouldn't really have an "application" to get published.

[joehoyle]

Ah i did not realize they had that option!

[iloabn]

I created an account just to see if it would let me or ask for company details. Did not ask me during signup and I could press "Skip" when it did ask me about "company details" during onboarding process.
I'll attempt to connect with a bank and see if I can do that while still not being a company.

[iloabn]

Seems to still be a potential candidate.
I got this:

The "censored" parts is my name in the format "firstname.lastname", seems like that's what they default to when no business info is provided.
Some info seem to live underneath "Company info", but it doesn't seem like I need to fill that in to still use the 50 free connections (or "requisitions" as they call them).

[iloabn]

Wop wop! Managed to get my real account balances and transactions from my bank account while never having to say that I'm a business 😄 To me, GoCardless therefore still feels like a contender to help with EU accounts.

[portovep]

My vote goes for GoCardless too. I have been successfully using their APIs to extract personal account balances and write them monthly into a Google Sheet with a Python AWS Lambda.

[joehoyle]

Just a tidbit I remember from working with the API:

It's only possible to get access to accounts for 90 days at a time, at which point you need to re-authenticate with GoCardless. Also, what makes it a little more tricky is that each authentication (requisition) provides different Account IDs, so updating an existing bank-account link is quite difficult. I had to resort to trying to match the accounts between requisitions by IBAN, etc. That sort of works (accounts can have IBAN, PAN, MaskedPAN etc), but that's not always reliable. For example, linking a PayPal account has no account number, and given the GoCardless Account ID changes from requisition to requisition I never got a way to relink those account types. I'm not sure if this is a solved problem with the existing aggregators in maybe-finance.

[iloabn]

I believe the 90 days at a time isn't specific to GoCardless, but rather an EU thing / something the bank enforces. I know I had the same thing when using Tink last year and think I've heard something about that directly from my bank.

[iloabn]

Or maybe I am wrong. I just found this quote from my bank:

The customer consent is valid for a maximum of 180 days.

I did also find this on the GoCardless site:

Use this step (/api/v2/agreements/enduser/) only if you want to specify other than default end user agreement terms: 90 days of transaction history, 90 days of account access period and full scope of information (details, balances, transactions). If no custom end user agreement is created, default terms will be applied.