How does mint.com connect to online banks in order to get or download banking transaction data?
Do banks have a standard mechanism for mint.com to connect, or is mint.com simulating a real person logging in and using the online banking site?
2 Answers
Mint uses Yodlee as its backend: http://www.yodlee.com/solutions_dv_aasdk.shtml
From that site:
The Yodlee Data Network
Yodlee's patented data, payments and risk management utility supports more than 11,000 account sources (banking, bills, investments, etc.) and over 100,000 different account types - creating the world's broadest and most diverse database of consumer financial and related information.
The data is gathered through a mixture of direct feeds and aggregation directly from web sites.
So it appears that in some cases they have direct connections to the banks, and in other cases they have to log in and access the website in the same way a person would.
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1I think by aggregation they are referring to web scraping (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping), something anyone can do themselves with a library or application like Selenium (seleniumhq.org). I use Selenium to scrape information from some sites which Mint or Yodlee does not support.– joshdoeAug 4, 2010 at 19:46
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3mint.com is going through the process of removing Yodlee (it seems) and directly connecting to banks - mint.com/account-migration– harwigApr 13, 2011 at 20:44
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After recently connecting mint to one of my accounts, I monitored the account session history and observed a logged in agent as 'Firefox Windows' from San Diego California so I might suppose they also use some sort of browser driver for collecting data as well Jan 26, 2020 at 17:57
There is a Standard to communicate with Banks. It is called HBCI.
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