Met a guy at a Toronto fintech meetup who swore by bank APIs

I was at a startup event in Toronto last March and this developer named Mark told me he refused to use any third-party financial tools. He said 'just connect straight to the bank's API and cut out the middleman.' I thought he was crazy at first but now I see his point after dealing with two failed integrations from a vendor. Has anyone else tried building directly on bank APIs and found it worth the hassle?

2 comments

2 Comments

theagibson2d ago

That "cut out the middleman" talk is exactly right until you're dealing with bank dev portals that look like they were built in 2005. The direct API route is doable but budget at least 2x more time for debugging than you think you need.

the_thea2d ago

Right, so what I ended up doing was building a little mock server locally that mimicked their janky API responses (the sandbox was just as bad, honestly). That way I could test all my edge cases without having to hit their actual endpoints every 30 seconds and deal with their weird rate limiting. Took me a weekend to reverse engineer their docs and errors, but it saved me at least two weeks of back and forth with their support later. Plus I could simulate timeouts and malformed data on purpose (their actual service does that plenty on its own, trust me). The extra upfront work felt annoying but it's the only reason I hit my launch deadline.