[GNC-dev] Is PSD2 / Open Banking API / XS2A usable for GnuCash?

[Anselm Martin Hoffmeister]

Hallo Cristian,

PSD2 does not help end users (account holders) to obtain their data from 
the bank directly.

This is related to the political intention behind mandating the PSD-API 
for (all?) EU banks.

There are certain agents in the financial market that profit from access 
to customer data (and aggregation thereof). Think of fintech lender 
companies that can check the credit worthiness of an applicant by 
accessing their spending history from their main account via 
standardized means. Those are the ones that profit from the API.

For private customers there is **absolutely no way** to access a bank 
API directly. This is only open to (somewhat) trustworthy parties that 
prove their proficiency in banking language, have some kind of 
insurance, and put money into that process way above any regular monthly 
salary... and are a registered _company_.

We had a discussion on aqbanking list about one certain fintech company 
that plays kind of API proxy for interested developers / end users, at 
the moment even for free. This may seem a wonderful prospect, accessing 
all the banks' transaction data even from those that do not regularly 
offer their customers any digital data, let alone structured information.

The consensus was - iirc - that developing an aqbanking interface to 
that service helps mostly _their_ business model, not necessarily so 
much the users, and everyone would pay with their banking data. 
Depending on what that is worth to you, you might look into it - I did 
not any further.

In case your Nordea account offers CSVs, you might better work with 
those, in a half-automated fashion?

Lucky me has a german banking market that has a (rather national) data 
access standard, FinTS, that mostly works quite well - nearly all 
established checking account banks offer it. The newer fintechs mostly 
do not have that access though - one more reason to not bank with them, 
I imagine. Sorry this does not help with the swedish market.

Best regards

Anselm

Am 26.04.2023 um 23:01 schrieb Cristian Klein:
> Hello,
>
> TL;DR: Given infinite development bandwidth, can one even dream of using
> PSD2 for Online Banking with GnuCash?
>
> I wanted to improve visibility into my spendings (what do you know, it's
> 2023 😀) and wanted to try using GnuCash again ... after a 10-year break.
>
> However, my life situation changed, and I no longer have the time (nor
> patience) to manually enter all transactions into GnuCash. Therefore,
> hearing about all the hype around PSD2, I thought maybe GnuCash already
> supports pulling all transactions from my bank (Nordea, Sweden, EU).
>
> Why don't I just hack a PSD2 backend for AqBanking?
>
> So ... I read up on PSD2 and here is what I understood:
>
>     - It introduces a heck of a lot of acronyms.
>     - It essentially mandates an open API for access to my transaction
>     information.
>     - TPP = "Third Party Provider", i.e., the entity who -- upon my consent
>     -- gets access to my transaction info.
>     - XS2A = "Access to Account" is an API to essentially retrieve
>     transaction information.
>     - TPP needs to onboard at two levels:
>        - First, the TPP needs to get some kind of certificate ("QSealC eIDAS
>        Public certificate" -- in case anyone Googles this message) from the
>        National Financial Authority, e.g., BaFin in Germany,
> Finansinspektionen in
>        Sweden, etc.
>        - Second, the TPP needs to get onboarded with each bank.
>
> I learned these by reading the following documents:
>
>     -
>     https://medium.com/@mpn123/building-an-open-banking-access-to-account-xs2a-api-as-a-bank-or-aspsp-479f26b91a43
>     -
>     https://www.openbankingeurope.eu/media/1176/preta-obe-mg-001-002-psd2-xs2a-tpp-user-management-guide.pdf
>     -https://developer.nordeaopenbanking.com/pitching-form/compliance
>
> Does this essentially mean that PSD2 and XS2A is only usable for accounting
> software delivered as SaaS and useless for accounting software delivered as
> desktop applications like GnuCash?
>
> Any insight is appreciated.
>
> Best,
>