Getting Bank Statement information from Open Banking or Tax information from HMRC using an API

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Getting bank statement information

Almost all of the banks in the UK use Open Banking. A few don't including Starling and Metro, but the vast majority do. We have the ability to download data from the banks into our systems. We have also made available an API that enables you to download data into your systems or indeed your spreadsheets. This is the home page for that system and explains how it works.

You can also use our API interface to get tax information via HMRC

REST Apis

APIs are 'Applications Programming Interfaces. These are systems for one computer to talk to another one and pass information either one way or both ways. REST means 'Representational state transfer'. This is a type of API that uses some of the HTTP functions that browsers use. When people talk about APIs they normally mean REST Apis.

that you can download for free to tests out APIs. There is also a standard system of rules for defining how APIs work that is now called 'open api', but was previously called 'swagger' that you can use to configure 'postman'.The good news about REST Apis is that the rules are pretty much the same so there are standard pieces of software to use to get information. Hence it is not as difficult as writing programs from scratch. There is even a system called 'PostMan' which you can see on this website

Authorisation (normally spelt Authorization)

If you are using an API you need to have some way of authorising it (they normally use the US spelling) when you use our system you can get an authorisation token simply by logging on and asking for that.

Step by step instructions for testing the API

  1. Authorise some bank accounts on one of your legal entities (a legal entity is a company or person and you can authorise more than onebank account this is done on the Manage Banks page.
  2. Download postman from this website
  3. Copy the swagger definition of our API to the clipboard. Click here to see it.
  4. Load that intothe swagger editor. You can use that to look at what you send to the API and what comes back.
  5. Import the definitions into postman (see postman for how to do this). This can be done from the clipboard.
  6. Get a new authorisation token for the legal entity concerned. Click here to see your list of legal entities. Then pick the right legal entity and take the option to get a new token.
  7. Put the authorisation token into postman.
  8. Run some tests