Il banking di domani con la tecnologia di oggi

BankBotsBank, progetto open source nato per abilitare interfacciamenti moderni (API) in applicazioni di (home) banking tradizionali, legacy (via screen scraping). Poco più di un esperimento, probabilmente senza troppo futuro, dal quale però -sono convinto- potranno derivare implementazioni software interessanti.

“BankBotsBank is an open effort to provide free and comprehensive programmatic access to personal accounts data on any bank of the world. It’s an enabler of new fintech applications.

Hopefully some day all banks will provide an API, like Mondo, but in the meantime the only way to get programmatic access to bank accounts is through screen scraping. Developing this kind of software without the collaboration of banks requires to have accounts in all of them, with all the products (savings accounts, credit cards…) We think the most effective approach is an open-source, distributed effort where each developer uses their own bank account to implement a bot for that bank.

The first bot that has been implemented returns a JavaScript object (or JSON in the web interface) with the most recent transactions of the user’s main account in the Spanish bank BBVA. You can easily try it through this web form.

It uses Nightmare, a browser automation library that uses Electron (based on Chromium) under the covers. The code of the BBVA bot can be used as an example to develop bots for other banks.

This repo also contains the Dockerfile used to deploy the project to AWS Elastic Beanstalk (this is where the BBVA test formand bot are hosted). It shows how to use xvfb-run to run Nightmare on a computer without a graphical display”.