EU Bank with Good API?
I am working on a service that connects buyers and sellers and will be doing plenty of pay-outs. The company is based in EU and EUR has been chosen as settling currency. I am therefore looking for an EU-base bank with good API to automate the necessary processes. So far, local banks are very bad in this regard. I looked at Wise and Revolut but they won't give me access to the sandbox environment to test and evaluate their APIs without signing up for paid business plan straight away, which is simply a no-go. Can you therefore recommend a bank with good API? By good I mean that it at least has a concept of idempotency and nonce and webhooks. I really don't need that much but the state of things is rotten.
Keep in mind that unless you have the right licenses you can't be in the money flow between buyers and sellers. Meaning buyers money can't go to your bank account and then you pay the sellers.
For this you should use stripe connect, adyen marketplace or payaut.
To connect directly to a European Bank's API you need to be PSD2 compliant, which costs about 100,000 EUR
You need a partner who is PSD2 compliant. Nordigen is the easiest to work with, but their API might not have all of the features you need.
If you only want to access your own accounts (not your clients accounts) then the rules might be different.
We use Mangopay (https://www.mangopay.com/) at $DAYJOB as a payment provider.
They have a working API (in python at least) and a functionning sandbox environment.
Highjacking this topic: is anyone aware of a bank whose APIs I can use as a private customer? I just want to automatically pull in my transfers and balance and analyse it using jupyter notebooks. Would actually love to be able to use a CLI to transfer money, but that's even farther out. My banking app sucks.
Hey,
I've worked on integrations with a whole range of banks across Europe, and I will say that all the sandboxes are dreadful and out of date and banks won't give you access to anything near production unless you have an account with them.
For business/corporate accounts you can integrate directly with the banks own premium/treasury APIs, in which case you generally won't need PSD2 certificates, however it does depend on the appetite of the risk department of the bank.
Of the requirements you're looking for, webhooks are not that common yet. This is mainly because it wasn't within the scope of PSD2. Banks are starting to implement this though as a premium feature.
If you want more detail I can give you an overview of what you need to know - sounds like we might be able to help here at Payable.
Most of the banks have a basic PSD2 API implementation just to stick with the regulation. But there are many open banking providers, i've used https://www.aiia.eu/ they were really good and also had better DX
Been on a similar search for a while. Looks like the PSD2 directive is really only a suggestion to EU banks. Sadly.
Maybe https://tink.com/ has a product you can use?
Perhaps I am cynical, but I think it's just a matter of time until businesses will require to connect to your bank accounts whenever you want the simplest thing from them.
I haven't used it, but they are a tech bank.
https://clearjunction.com/ offers pretty decent APIs and the features you described. Virtual bank accounts, per-customer deposit vaults, payouts, payins, webhooks and so on... They've been fairly reliable over the years.
Would Stripe's Connect work for you? They have all the tools for setting up a platform that onboards merchants, takes payments on their behalf and pays them out. You can sign up and use the sandbox for free, and only pay when you process transactions.
Very funny that we have PSD2 yet almost no one can actually use it
Hmm. I signed up for Revolut business sandbox api recently and it didn’t ask me to pay first. I could use the api etc. Did they change?
Maybe looking for a dedicated payout service might work in this regard. Companies like Adyen have Payout APIs