Ask HN: Why would people trust their banking credentials to a service like Mint?

49 points

11 years ago

I wrote my own unofficial API for a banking website[0] (check balance, send money, view transaction history) by essentially writing a crawler that would do whatever the a user would do if they were navigating the website themselves. I built it for fun to see if it was possible and then shelved it along with the rest of the half-completed projects littering my hard drive.

I was wondering how feasible it would be to use it as a basis for a service to facilitate e-commerce. It would require the user to give me, a 3rd party, their credentials which isn't something I'd recommend someone to do. But then again, Mint has done well for themselves doing just that so perhaps my opinion on the matter isn't entirely relevant.

PayPal, BrainTree, Stripe, etc. are not available in my corner of the world and I feel that's too bad cause a good payments solution could be a big deal to businesses and consumers alike if available. I'd be happy if the bank shuts down my service as long as they (or someone else) provide an alternative.

Have you provided your bank credentials to Mint or another similar 3rd party service? If so why? Did you ever stop to think if it was a bad idea? Do you think most people do?

[0] https://github.com/xtrumanx/zapi

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