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Launch HN: Fuse (YC W19) – Unified API for financial data aggregators
94 points by tonikami on June 27, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 37 comments
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.



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!


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?


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.


Forgive me if this is dumb, but is Fuse connect a direct route to connect to banks orthogonal to third party aggregators? Is there a way to say no third parties?

My priorities are privacy first then wider coverage for bank accounts. I'd rather some consumers are blocked form accessing the service than having their transaction data getting leaked to intermediaries.


Hey, right now Fuse is dependent on third party aggregators and is most useful for companies that want to increase coverage and reliability. One idea if you're concerned with aggregators storing your customer data, is to only whitelist institutions where connections are established through OAuth. This way the aggregator won't be storing any account credentials. Most top aggregators have a few of the top institutions using OAuth now, so if coverage is not an issue for you this would be a good path.


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


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.


> No one seems to be interested in making these APIs available in a direct-to-consumer model for their own personal data only

I wouldn't expect this use case to be filled by a business. It's just not a good market to go after unless you like picking up pennies.


Bootstrapped by one person: https://lunchmoney.app/


Maybe orthogonal but I am looking for a financial one api proxy that doesn't store my customers' data (only routes them). Do you have any plans to have a Fuse native aggregator that doesn't scrape customer transactions?

I don't use any product that forces me to use Plaid because they copy my transaction info. If anyone knows of aggregators that respect privacy please share them, AFAIK there are none.


Do you allow your customers to hold the customer access tokens for the sub-aggregators (Plaid, Finicity) or do you hold them?


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.


This is really cool! We currently locked into contract with one of the aggregators but can't wait to try this.


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


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?


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.


I'd really like this as a consumer. Pay $10 a month and get OFX files I can stick into whatever I want. Hope you get a customer that offers that service soon


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!


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/


Tangential. One reason for not finding many options in south America is that people here are cautious about giving out credentials.


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.


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/


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.


Hey, we've lifted the block, it should work now. Sorry about that!


Microsoft had MoneyCebtral in the 90s. And in typical MSFT fashion they killed a great product.


Do you offer a webhook for new transactions? The docs don't show it properly on mobile.


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: {} }


What is your pricing model?


For Fuse Connect we charge for Connection, Transaction & Balance request. You can find the exact price breakdown here - https://www.letsfuse.com/pricing


Got it, the header links next to your logo aren't showing on mobile/can't find your pricing page.


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


Sounds really good, how do you compare to Meld? We use them currently.


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


So plaid?


Looks like a plaid of Plaids


Typo on website: "Converstion rate"


Fixed! Thanks for pointing this out




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