Financial Application

[Alphonse Giambrone]

Not sure where to post this so if anyone has any other suggestion, please
post it.

A client has asked me to look into the feasability of creating a web based
financial application where clients can log in and view all of their
financial information from various other financial institutions on a single
page.

Something similar to https://www.livingbalancesheet.com/v1/marketing.htm.

The big question is how to collect the info from all the other institutions?
Do they have api's or web services or ??
Their sites don't have info for technical contacts.
Someone mentioned screen scraping, but I don't know if that is practical,
plus one would need to have an account with each institution just to get to
the correct pages.

TIA

 

[Marina]

This is not a trivial task, as I am sure each financial institution has
their own format for this, etc.

I know Back of America has this, but my guess would be they buy it from
another vendor. It might be best to just buy the service from them, and just
customize it to have the right look. Whatever the product is that does this,
I'm sure it took quite a bit of development to support all the different
types of logins, etc, for all the places.

 

[Lucas Tam]

The big question is how to collect the info from all the other
institutions? Do they have api's or web services or ??
Their sites don't have info for technical contacts.
Someone mentioned screen scraping, but I don't know if that is
practical, plus one would need to have an account with each
institution just to get to the correct pages.

I hope your client is willing to pay you big bucks : ) This sort of
application will take a lot of work... and time!

Most financial institutions will not readily release client information...
so you'll first have to build bridges with various banks to get access to
their systems (if they'll give it to you!).

However, some banks do offer Quicken, CSV, etc downloads of client
statements... but this is mostly a manual process.

I wouldn't do screen scraping - there are just too many variables, too many
banks, etc... it's just not fesible.

 

[Alphonse Giambrone]

Thanks both for the replies.
Client does not expect it to be cheap. The ongoing fees for the existing
services as so exorbitant that it is worth looking into.

 

[alex_f_il]

You can easily transform the Web based financial applications into
services with SWExplorerAutomation
(SWEA)(http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWIEAutomation.htm). SWEA
creates an object model (automation interface) for any Web application
running in Internet Explorer.