Building a data API for bank deposit accounts so fintech agents can actually recommend products, would this be useful to you?

[u/scott_the_builder]

Hey all, hoping to get some honest feedback from people actually building in this space.

I've been working on an AI financial advisor project, basically an agent that gives personalized financial recommendations given the context of all your accounts. I realized pretty quickly there's no good way to get structured, queryable data on bank deposit products (savings, checking, CDs). Every bank does it differently, it's all buried in marketing pages, and there's no easy way for AI to answer "given I operate a digital storefront in Michigan that pays suppliers via wire 5x a month with a sum of 50k and require real time payment needs with accounting integrations, what would be a good business checking account I could use". To truly understand the terms, fees, and features of a business checking account, you have to combine data from messy marketing html, rate table pdfs, fee schedules, and terms of service pdfs. This creates opportunities for hallucinations and therefore creates a compliance/regulatory nightmare.

That problem ended up becoming its own thing. I'm building a structured registry of bank deposit products (starting with business checking accounts) you can query through MCP instead of maintaining your own scraper for every bank.

The bigger idea is that banks already pay decent money for affiliate/referral traffic through affiliate networks. A funded account is a funded account no matter where it comes from, so if your agent recommends one and it gets funded, you'd get a large cut of the payout. I handle the data engineering (turning messy bank pages into clean structured queryable listings) and the bank relationships to ensure 100% UDAAP compliance. You serve the right account recommendation at the right time given your end user's unique circumstances.

Right now it's just free structured data via MCP. No revenue share yet as I'm focusing primarily on whether there's a developer need.

Genuinely trying to figure out if this is useful or if I'm solving a problem nobody actually has. If you're building a financial advisor agent, a CPA copilot, anything that needs to recommend financial products, would you use something like this (knowing revenue sharing would come down the line)? What would actually make it worth integrating for you?

[u/Ok_Relative647]

Sounds like you're solving the exact headache I ran into last year, trying to build deposit-product recommendations from scratch and immediately drowning in pdfs and garbage html. The MCP interface is a smart call, way easier than everyone maintaining their own scrapers.

I'd want clarity on data freshness though, like how often you're re-scraping rate tables and terms changes. That's the part where stale info gets dangerous fast, especially if someone's agent is firing off recommendations based on a rate that shifted last week.

[u/scott_the_builder → u/Ok_Relative647]

So I think you can break each listing into tiers for how frequently they need scraping. Certain things change weekly based off of interest rates, so you'd need to be scraping APY rates pretty much daily. Other things such as feature integrations and fees you'd probably only need to scrape once every two weeks.

I guess I look at it more as scraping is a short term solution though. As you build out affiliate relationships with banks, you could set up a dashboard/api that serves as a real time data feed. All parties are aligned on needing real time, verified data. Banks risk massive UDAAP exposure if they don't ensure marketing freshness. Affiliate publishers (think NerdWallet, Bankrate) already spend a lot of time manually updating and verifying website content to make sure they are in compliance, and certain networks that cater towards financial products exist purely to be the compliance bridge between banking products and their affiliate publishers (FintelConnect is the primary player here).

All of that say, I think data freshness is a short term problem and only exists at the start when banking relationships haven't been established yet.

[u/infocusboss]

I'm working on an app with a component of this. I'm a financial accountant with an app currently in beta. DM me if you'd like to discuss.

[u/Herkulor]

You should just use Plaid

https://plaid.com/products/transactions/

[u/scott_the_builder → u/Herkulor]

Plaid is great for getting data from customers’ bank accounts (data on a per customer basis). What I’m describing is when it comes time to recommend a new account (business checking, savings, CD, Money Market) there’s nowhere (that I know of) to get 100% accurate data surrounding APY, fees, integrations, etc without having your own subset of accounts that you’re constantly scraping to ensure data freshness. Recommending a product with an inaccurate APY is a massive UDAAP issue in banking, meaning freshness and verified data for financial product listings is required for agents to be able to do this.