[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Fuse (YC W19) - Unified API for financial...
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Launch HN: Fuse (YC W19) - Unified API for financial data
aggregators
Hey HN, we're the co-founders of Fuse (https://www.letsfuse.com/).
We offer a single integration to multiple financial data
aggregators and automatically select the most reliable one for each
institution. Here's a quick demo: https://youtu.be/w7sNHGav0Fg If
you're building a product that requires customers to link their
financial accounts, you might integrate a financial data aggregator
(such as Plaid, Truelayer, or Finicity) to connect with your user's
bank account. You'll probably then experience the following issues:
customers unable to use your product because their financial
institution is not supported (e.g., credit unions, local or
community banks); frequent disconnections; API errors; and high
drop-offs during the bank linking flow. We spent 2.5 years
developing YSplit, a fintech app providing joint spending cards for
couples. Users linked their bank accounts for spend limits but
faced issues with unsupported banks and frequent disconnections. We
looked at other apps and saw that the ideal solution was to rely on
multiple aggregators, but it wasn't the right use of engineering
resources for that startup. Upon pivoting from YSplit, though, we
decided to go back to that problem and address it. We provide a UI
component for React, React Native, Flutter, iOS & Android native to
facilitate bank account linkage within your app. When a user taps
on an institution, we use a time series model to identify the most
optimal aggregator to show based on historical success rates and
disconnection as well as downtime. After linkage, we provide a Fuse
access token for querying balance, transactions, and more via our
unified API, offering a consistent model irrespective of the
aggregator. We also provide other products to translate historical
bank data into consumer/business credit risk to help you answer
questions like: How much credit can I feel comfortable offering
this user or company? Is a user likely to pay me on time? Can I
offer instant ACH to this customer? By combining aggregators, you
gain from their diverse connection methods, favoring APIs over
screen scraping. Our customers have cut disconnections by 16%,
increased coverage by 5k institutions in the US, and boosted
conversions by 20% with Fuse. Moreover, we support aggregators in
Africa, Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia, enabling global
product expansion with a single API. We don't store personal info
and only act as a pass-through. We are currently undergoing SOC 2
II audit and can provide engagement letters for anyone looking to
go to production. We have a self-serve onboarding
https://dashboard.letsfuse.com to get sandbox keys. Our docs are
available here https://docs.letsfuse.com. We'd love for you to try
it and give us feedback on improvements to the product and docs. If
you have any feature requests or any aggregators you'd like us to
support, let us know.
Author : tonikami
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-06-27 15:56 UTC (7 hours ago)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What is your pricing model?
| tonikami wrote:
| For Fuse Connect we charge for Connection, Transaction &
| Balance request. You can find the exact price breakdown here -
| https://www.letsfuse.com/pricing
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Got it, the header links next to your logo aren't showing on
| mobile/can't find your pricing page.
| tonikami wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out! We've resolved it by adding
| the pricing to the footer on mobile. We'll push a better
| fix for that this week
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| I just sent an email using the Contact link on your website at
| support@letsfuse.com?subject=Hey%20I%20need%20help
|
| but I immediately received an error: Message
| blocked Your message to catchall@ysplit.com has been
| blocked. See technical details below for more information.
|
| The response was: Message bounced due to
| organizational settings.
| tonikami wrote:
| Hey, we've lifted the block, it should work now. Sorry about
| that!
| aiisahik wrote:
| Do you allow your customers to hold the customer access tokens
| for the sub-aggregators (Plaid, Finicity) or do you hold them?
| tonikami wrote:
| We have an endpoint that returns the sub aggregator access
| tokens for any connection that is established through Fuse -
| https://docs.letsfuse.com/reference/getfinancialconnection
|
| So if our customers want to use another service or build it out
| themselves in house at a later date, they can always get all
| the original tokens.
|
| We've also seen some of our customers use this endpoint to get
| access to original tokens and use it to make a request that we
| don't support yet via the original aggregator.
| matdehaast wrote:
| This is really cool! We currently locked into contract with one
| of the aggregators but can't wait to try this.
| tonikami wrote:
| Thanks! If you already have an aggregator contracts, you can
| pass in the API keys into our backend and we'll use that for
| new connections. We have many users who come in with existing
| aggregators and want to combine it with another one to improve
| coverage. Here's an example of the SDK initialization -
| https://docs.letsfuse.com/docs/fuse-sdk
|
| We also partner with some of the aggregators, so if you wanted
| to combine your existing one with a new one, we can help you
| setup the contract with no effort on your end.
|
| Our unified endpoints are also backward compatible, so if you
| pass in an aggregator access token instead of a Fuse access
| token it'll work as expected.
|
| Happy to answer any other questions you have
| marginalien wrote:
| An aggregator that aggregates other aggregators? Actually it's
| even more complex, as many of the established aggregators already
| collaborate with each other behind the scenes.
|
| Very meta-meta-ish. Exciting, but also a lot of dependencies.
| Good luck!
| kolanos wrote:
| Typo on website: "Converstion rate"
| tonikami wrote:
| Fixed! Thanks for pointing this out
| sails wrote:
| Coverage for UK providers like Truelayer? Currently using Codat
| as an aggregator pass through for Truelayer as they manage auth
| flow and sync bank data to their platform, which saves us the
| infra hassle on both. Wonder how viable this is to for you to
| provide?
| tonikami wrote:
| This is a great request! We've been considering building out a
| managed auth flow and bank syncing, would love to chat for 15
| minutes and learn from your use case. Does any of these times
| work for you this week https://calendly.com/letsfuse/fuse-
| demo-15, appreciate it!
|
| In regards to coverage in the UK, we currently support
| Truelayer and we are building out a Tink and SaltEdge
| integration. They'll be available early next month.
| digitcatphd wrote:
| So plaid?
| [deleted]
| jonahbenton wrote:
| You "don't store personal info" but you "provide other products
| to translate historical bank data into consumer/business credit
| risk."
|
| Sorry, those two statements are in contradiction. Which one is
| true?
|
| On a more opinionated front, consumer "credit" risk specifically
| based on personal _deposit_ account balances and transactions is
| an insanely privacy violating and unregulated (generally)
| offering. Business is different. Why even go consumer?
| tonikami wrote:
| Hey, we don't store personal info for our core product which is
| Fuse Connect we only act as a pass through. The
| Consumer/Business Credit Risk product does require us to store
| historic transaction data in order to calculate insights.
|
| Over the past few years a lot of consumer apps have started
| using bank data to determine credit risk for customers. From
| our experience this is generally accepted by consumers, as
| credit data does not provide the full picture. For example, I
| am originally from the UK and after moving to the US, I had no
| credit history so it was generally hard for me to use any
| service that could not determine risk based on cash flow.
|
| We also offer Business Risk Report.
| roynasser wrote:
| I couldnt find a list of supported institutions, my interest is
| mostly in the south american and european ones as most
| aggregators fall short. thanks!
| tonikami wrote:
| Hey, for South America we support Belvo, here's a list of
| institutions they support:
| https://developers.belvo.com/docs/institution In Europe, we
| support Truelayer.
|
| Here's a list of all the aggregators we support and their
| institutions: https://fuseconnect.canny.io/
| gfarah wrote:
| Tangential. One reason for not finding many options in south
| America is that people here are cautious about giving out
| credentials.
| asdev wrote:
| Access to financial data is stupidly expensive. Making a
| budgeting app that serves 100 power users isn't possible to
| bootstrap. I wish it wasn't this way, would enable way more
| applications to be built
| jimmcslim wrote:
| I am in violent agreement. In Australia we have a government-
| legislated initiative called the "Consumer Data Right", through
| which the development and implementation of Open Banking APIs
| across the banking sector has taken place. Unfortunately to
| access these APIs you need to be an Accredited Data Recipient
| which places all sorts of (quite reasonable) obligations upon
| you. No one seems to be interested in making these APIs
| available in a direct-to-consumer model for their own personal
| data only - where compliance with the obligations should no
| longer be necessary since it is at your own risk.
| ssijak wrote:
| Sounds really good, how do you compare to Meld? We use them
| currently.
| tonikami wrote:
| That's awesome! Which features are you using? We are focused on
| giving the end users the best UX & UI as well as providing more
| mobile & web SDK to make development seamless. We also have
| aggregators in every continent. Would be curious to get your
| thoughts on our docs
| RileyJames wrote:
| Is there an easy way to see what services you cover, and what
| institutions/services they cover?
|
| By region, I'm interested what you cover in Australia.
| tonikami wrote:
| Hey, for Australia we support Basiq. Here's a list of
| institutions they support: https://www.basiq.io/supported-
| insitutions/
|
| You can find the other aggregators we've unified here:
| https://fuseconnect.canny.io/
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| Do you offer a webhook for new transactions? The docs don't show
| it properly on mobile.
| tonikami wrote:
| Hey, yes we have the transactionupdate webhook that is
| triggered when new transactions are available to fetch:
| https://docs.letsfuse.com/reference/transactionsupdates
|
| Here's an example webhook: { type: 'transactions.updates',
| financial_connection_id: "financial_connection_id",
| environment: "sandbox", source: "teller", //Boolean indicating
| whether historical transaction information (up to 24 months) is
| ready to be queried. historical_transactions_available: true,
| //An array of string transaction ids indicated the transactions
| that have been removed and will not be available if the
| transactions are queried again. Currently only supported by
| plaid removed_transaction_ids: [ "tx_1234", "tx_5677" ]
| remote_data: {} }
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(page generated 2023-06-27 23:00 UTC)