The Open Bank Project is an Open Source project that aims to open financial transaction data to wider groups of individuals and software applications - and raise the bar of financial transparency through a developer friendly application programming interface (API).
It provides a web application that allows account holders to choose with whom they share what data. Thus a public institution may allow the public to view all of its banking transactions whilst ensuring that privacy and commercial confidentiality is preserved. The same institution can allow others to view all transaction details following secure authentication.
An NGO receiving funding from a group of donors could share its financial transactions with those donors so that they are able to see where their money is really being spent.
User Story 1 : Help us provide OAuth support.
As an app developer, I’d like to connect to the OBP server and access privileged information. I’d like to authorise my app using OAuth. This feature is high up on our TODO list and would involve Scala / Lift programming and possibly calling a Java OAuth library.
User Story 2 : Help us connect to an HBCI backend.
As an end user, I’d like to access (and share) my transactions in which are stored in a bank that supports HBCI. Help us write / integrate a connector to talk to an HBCI backend.
User Story 3 : Help us refactor our Scala / Lift code.
As a developer we would like to have perfectly test driven elegantly written flawless code. ;-) We’ve developed our demo in the order of “make it work, make it right, make it fast”. So now we need to make it a bit more right! If you’re into Scala / Lift you could help us refactor and clean up our core code.
User Story 4 : (HTML5) Financial Data Visualisation
As a member of the general public, I want to be able to see the financial data of an adopting organisation in a compelling way so that I can better understand how money is being spent. Produce some interesting visualisations using HTML5 (or any other technology) consuming JSON data via our simple API.
User Story 5 : Notification / alert support
As a member of the public, I’d like to alert an account holder if I see a suspicious transaction. Either help us notification support to the OBP server, or help with social (e.g. Twitter) based alerts.
User Story 6: Integrate Open Corporates Data
As a researcher I’d like to see information from Open Corporates next to each transaction so I can better understand the company involved in the transaction. Provide data or popup to show further information about each creditor or debtor.
User Story 7: Any other idea…
We’d love to see your creativity unleashed to help us promote financial transparency, please make use of the Open Bank API in anyway you like!
- Read only transaction data (so far)
- Data is mediated - some confidential data fields have aliases to preserve privacy.
- No authentication mechanisms as yet (OAuth on the way). Thus only public data available.
Help us on the Open Bank Project core system (developed using Scala / Lift) - or help us connect your bank using a screen scraper (use Python or any language you like) or help with a Scala/Java connector to HBCI.
- Banking Transparency: http://www.banktrack.org/banktrack.org
- Bank API : HBCI/FinTS, CAstore, AXA Bank API
- Sharing banking transactions with friends: blippy.com/
4 people are working on the Open Bank Project plus a wider network of contributors. We’re making contact with banks and NGO’s in order that they may fund some development costs. Our next steps are further talks with banks and getting more organisations to use the system.