Hi! I want to propose a quick and nice workaround to unlock all the people on this thread (including myself) without too much of a commitment on Emma’s side.
How about just one endpoint with a date-range filter to get a CSV? This functionality is already present in the app, if we could just download the same CSV via api that would basically allow for 99% of usecases we (developers) are looking for. Auth can be done via api key which would give readonly access to download that csv.
I cancelled my subscription and deleted my account because I got frustrated with the lack of integrations and no way to automate my offline accounts. I got tired of having to manually update the values of my ISAs and pensions.
I went to Moneyhub instead which had all of the integrations I needed, but Emma has a better user experience by far. If you give me a way to import transactions to my offline accounts via an API I’ll come back.
Have you considered using something like this instead?
One day when/if I have the time I want to write my own app that’ll scrape my transactions through this API and then pass them on to Grafana / Splunk to visualise how I want.
No, Bank Account Data is the former Nordigen product which they acquired & subsequently made available for free. It’s actually pretty cool - it’s like Salt Edge, just open banking instead of screen scraping. Lots of open source projects using it for bank integration (firefly iii, actual budget, CLI tools etc.).
Btw you guys should have a field day if you implemented an integration with this, you’d get access to a huge pot of European banks (2,500 of which 116 in UK only - including my favourite Cater Allen )
The lack of APIs reduces the partner adoption of Emma’s capabilities than can feed into wider scope financial planning tools. Restricting next steps from Emma’s conclusions to purely Emma’s marketplace is ruling out a much bigger market that a partner network would enable and APIs are key for that.
I was replying to @jayrlsw. Dunno what features they specifically needed but if they just wanted transaction data and were already tech savvy enough to know how to use an API they could use that instead of / while waiting for an Emma API.
As much as I’d love to have an Emma API, it’s not something we’re likely to prioritise anytime soon. The main challenge is adoption — realistically, it’d probably only be used by a handful of people, which makes it hard to justify the investment right now.
That said, things move fast and who knows — maybe we’ll get an intern to build it at some point.
With Moneyhub shutting down, I’m not even sure there’s a good alternative for your specific use case, unfortunately.
In the world of AI driven coding and democratisation of development, this API would be incredibly useful. So hoping to bump it up again. I think that people will now be able to build their own apps with Emma acting as the middleware to extract the data from banks etc.
I do hear your point on it likely being only used by a subset of users.
Alternative - expose via MCP?
A much larger set of your users will have ChatGPT, Claude, or an alternative - so if you enabled access to Emma via MCP, people would be able to start using their own AI agents with the comprehensive set of finance tools Emma offers.
This is a pattern which is growing a lot of traction in the business community (MCP access to Xero or other business accountancy software) - and certainly has attracted non-technical users too.
+1 - would really like to be able to access my data in Emma via MCP so I can query it via Claude. This would make a huge difference not just to developers, but any regular user who knows enough to connect their AI client with Emma.
You could provide an API, or an MCP server, or both.
We have entered AI Agentic era. I am sure lots of people will want to build own Personal Finance Assistant with Claude or GPT that can pull data from all finance products that they have accounts with. Yes, Open Banking API is part of that. But there is more. Trading, Pensions, Budgets. I am also building my Finance Assistant agent and really would like to have access to all my data from my Emma account via Emma MCP.
I understand that you probably have lots of other priorities, but just wanted to say I would really love if you build an open API and MCP. Maybe it can be a part of Ultimate Plan or Max or whatever. I think some people would pay a few extra bucks for that.
While I would also love developer friendly features I think we all need to be anchored in reality. Emma is a consumer product (not b2b, not b2dev etc). I seriously doubt they would make their money back from the small population of power users alone.
Also the focus seems to be more now on monetising the large (consumer) user base by upselling/cross selling basic services like savings accounts, ISAs, pensions, etc. MSE/money to the masses kind of thing.
For power users there’s still go cardless, actualbudget, firefly iii…
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