How Financial Data API Helps Various Use Cases of Fintech Companies by Validating Customer Data with Speed and Ease
Fintech businesses are faced with data validation problem in a large volume. Data point limitation in helping validate customers’ data causes high fraud rate, and low approval rate. The question is, how long will fintech companies be able to tackle this problem?
If data point that is used to validate customer’s data are still limited, then there is a big chance that fintech companies will face this same problem until years later. For that, fintech companies require data point from various sources that can help validation processes, such as: banks, e-wallet, telco, e-commerce, GIG account, and others. These data point sources are able to be utilized for validating balances, transaction, and other use cases so users may seamlessly continue action related to disbursement, onboarding, and other approval process inside a fintech application.
This article will show the problem-solving process of the above problem and aggregate users’ data from multiple data point using what we called “Financial data API”
We will use Brick API as our source of learning. In addition, Brick provides an open-source financial data API that we can use for creating our own simple and secure application, as well as customizable depending on your fintech app.
First Step
For this tutorial we will be using Python and Flask. Before you further read the tutorial, please make sure that you already have a Brick account. If you have not, you can sign up through Brick’s Dashboard.
Once you have signed up and confirmed your email, you can now login to our Dashboard and you will see your:
● Client ID
● Client Secret
These credentials will be used to access Brick API sandbox environment, so save it on a memo to easily access it.
How Financial Data API can help you
Financial data API will act as a connector between a user and your fintech app by providing you and endpoint that verify the user’s financial account credentials from multiple data point. In this case, we will use bank account as our data source.
This API helps verify user’s bank account and retrieve personal information (account holder, account ID), real-time balances, as well as transaction history.
All of the information mentioned previously can be accessed from a user-access-token, not including PIN to provide security. User must give their consent that their data will be retrieved upon using the service, as well as using Client ID and Client Secret that are unique to them so that you may receive the user-access-token.
Authentication using Widget
User needs to authorize the access and give their consent to it before user can access the information and connect their bank account in your fintech app. Brick uses token-based-authentication, so you don’t have to worry about the security.
User can sign in to their bank of choice through the widget link, after which the API response will be in JSON format and you can handle it however you like based on your application.
The link will direct you to the Brick Widget, where user will have to share their consent to retrieve the data from a list of data point that they choose.
https://sandbox.onebrick.io/v1/index?accessToken=public-access-token &redirect_url=redirect-link(Note : You can read about the widget more in detail from Brick documentation)
The redirect_url is an optional parameter, which if you access the widget without it, the result page will only be the user-access-token information.
Quick guide to setup the simple balance retrieval app from Brick’s open-source project
git clone https://gitlab.com/brick-sample-app/clients/python-sample-app.git#go to python dir
cd python-sample-app#input your ClientID and ClientSecret from Brick Account to python-sample-app/key.txt like the above picture
#clientID=client-ID
#clientSecret=client-Secret#to install all dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt#run the application
python main.py#on your browser
open http://localhost:5000
After going through the step above, you should see an app with the name money save. In the Bank selection, you can try the MockBank with Username: johndoe, password fintechFirst to try the Widget and API in sandbox environment.
Wrapping it up
That’s all for today! Remember that this is only one of the few easy ways of using financial data API for your app, which we used today to retrieve and aggregate bank balances from different sources. Financial data API allows your app to retrieve important financial information, that way automation and personalization would be much easier to implement.
Brick gives developers a set of tools to build amazing applications that can help users to retrieve data from multiple data point based on customer consent. If you would like to explore more using other data sources, do let us know
We hope that with this guide, you can implement financial data API for your app for verification processes by gaining access to multiple data point. You can check out the whole application code on GitHub.
