We built an API on top of Belgian banks
UPDATE 01/18: Omnibank/Ibanity has been acquired by Isabel Group in September 09/17, read the story.
UPDATE 03/17: Omnibank is now renamed ibanity for compliance reasons, you can read why in our latest story.
For a while now, in Belgium, we’ve been quite forgotten in the tech revolution that is happening in the banking sector. Whether you’re talking about PFMs (Personal Financial Manager) such as Mint.com, Linxo.com or other services in the likes of Plaid.com or Mondo to name a few, all these innovations have been happening everywhere but in Belgium.
To enable this, and make it possible for such an ecosystem to rise, you need a shift in the banks mindset, a shift to “let go”, and see what can be built on top of some of the data they possess.
For example, PFMs use bank transaction data, enrich them with external data sources, let you set personal goals, automated notifications etc…
Should you want to build something like this in Belgium, you’re stuck with last century’s technologies and barriers to entry, several have tried but as soon as they had to talk to Belgian banks, they failed. Hopefully, PSD2, the new version of the European directive on payment services, is going to lower those barriers, but it will likely still be expensive for startups and SMEs to build the proper tech to access their banking data.
We’re happy to announce that we have found a way to access bank accounts’ transactions data and are now able to allow developers to connect to their customers’ bank accounts or to their own. We are officially launching this project named Omnibank.
We are building an API that will be an aggregator of banking data on top of all popular Belgian and European banks
We are currently working on an API layer on top of most banks in Belgium that will make it possible, in one place, to get information about your customers’ accounts at all those supported banks and let them authorise which accounts from which banks can be accessed by your products using our API.
Supporting 2 banks already
Agreed, it’s not much, but it’s a start. Although the goal is to support most of them, we can already say that after a few days working on it, we managed to hook up to 2 banks in Belgium. We wanted to have more than one to make sure our technical solution could be repeatable and it seems it is. We are fairly confident that we will be able to add more banks in the following weeks but right now, we want to focus on making it as easy to use as possible before doing that. We are then focusing on our API and documentation to onboard projects asap before opening to the public.
Why would you want that?
- You are a Fintech startup that has been waiting for a while to get access to your customers’ banking transactions data through an API instead of CODA files and/or CSV imports to build new products around banks’ transactions data (PFMs, savings advisors, etc…).
- You are a startup or an SME that needs accounting automation because your business model requires it or simply to save time and alleviate human errors.
- You are a developper or a maker that simply wants to play around with your bank transaction data. Your money, your rules!
- You are a financial or insurance institution that would like to visualise the complete financial overview of your customers to help them make better decisions. Or you are a bank with internal innovation programs that want to quickly build POCs of new product ideas without going through the regular slow internal IT channels.
No, we are not faking it
At the moment, we wrote a set of tools to build bots that help us manage our incoming and outgoing transactions. We’ve linked this to our invoicing system and have simply built a small slack bot to have full transparency about money movements in our company. We’ve made a gif of our slack bot, most of the information is not shown as it is quite sensible data but if you don’t trust us, come visit us, we’ll be happy to show you a real life “uncensored” demo.
We are looking for alpha testers
We are looking for Fintechs or any developer with a project that would like to give it a try and help us shape our API. We want this to be as developer-friendly as possible and would therefore drive this part of our development with real projects. If you have something that would benefit from bank transaction data, subscribe to our waiting list on our website and we’ll get in touch with you.
Where do we go from here?
Our hope is that if we get enough support from the community and are able to show strong interest to banks, we will find ways to better collaborate with them and make this project durable over time. Currently, our plan is the following:
- First we finish what we started, ie. finalising and fine tuning the API by partnering with real projects.
- Then, we make sure we add at least 5 more Belgian banks on Omnibank (we currently only support two of them, but are working on others).
- After this, we will build libraries for all popular languages and work on a developer portal.
- Once the portal is done, we’ll open for public beta.
- Then, we’ll see, we have plenty of ideas on where to go once all the above is done, and you’ll have plenty of ideas too…
What’s the vision?
We believe that people should be empowered to manage their bank transactional data the way they want and that they should be given the right to share that information with whichever services they deem fit to get better quality of service and transparency than what their bank is currently offering them. The current state of the Belgian banking industry doesn’t allow this to be done easily for developers. Omnibank will change that.
So tell us, does it make any sense to you guys or is it just us?
We are open for feedback and suggestions, let us know how we could help you and what you’d build with an API on top of your bank accounts’ transactions data.
Contact us at contact@omnibank.io
Omnibank is a product made by Spin42.
