Back in the day, when mobiles were a craze and the SMS was just catching on, I had an itch. What if I could get the my bank account balance on my mobile. Not just for one bank but a consolidated balance across all banks.
The idea got me excited. I had a Nokia mobile with a serial connector. I hooked up my mobile to my desktop and wrote an ugly little program in VB.
I remember I had accounts with HDFC, ICICI and Citi. It took me a good while and along the way I got my accounts blocked for exceeding max tries for wrong passwords. Finally I had cracked it. I could get balances across all 3 of them. Each one of them had their own checks and balances. One of them checked for Referer Header and logged out in absence of one. Another one used javascript to create "POST". and so on.
Cut to 2013, When I was toying with the idea of my website, I the thought of revisiting this had occurred to me, but then I let go because I thought, It would be difficult to write this service for dozens of Banks in India. How will I keep the passwords safe. With hundreds of thousands of users using my website, I'll have to invest a lot to make things secure. But a year on and I being the only user, I think I can do it. I should do it to make my my own life better. I take 30-40 min every month just downloading the statements from the banks and then uploading these on my site. If I could write the program, this could be automated saving precious time.
And so I embarked on this journey all over again. Its fun. With its usual challenges et al. I started on this last week. I've had success in one of the banks, though I think they certainly have upped the game and it took me some time to understand how I should work around it.
Its a lot of work. I need to make an entire framework of how to schedule these downloads etc. I'm not even sure of whether this would work from within AWS environment.
A lot of challenges and the thrill of doing it... That's what I live for :)
The idea got me excited. I had a Nokia mobile with a serial connector. I hooked up my mobile to my desktop and wrote an ugly little program in VB.
I remember I had accounts with HDFC, ICICI and Citi. It took me a good while and along the way I got my accounts blocked for exceeding max tries for wrong passwords. Finally I had cracked it. I could get balances across all 3 of them. Each one of them had their own checks and balances. One of them checked for Referer Header and logged out in absence of one. Another one used javascript to create "POST". and so on.
Cut to 2013, When I was toying with the idea of my website, I the thought of revisiting this had occurred to me, but then I let go because I thought, It would be difficult to write this service for dozens of Banks in India. How will I keep the passwords safe. With hundreds of thousands of users using my website, I'll have to invest a lot to make things secure. But a year on and I being the only user, I think I can do it. I should do it to make my my own life better. I take 30-40 min every month just downloading the statements from the banks and then uploading these on my site. If I could write the program, this could be automated saving precious time.
And so I embarked on this journey all over again. Its fun. With its usual challenges et al. I started on this last week. I've had success in one of the banks, though I think they certainly have upped the game and it took me some time to understand how I should work around it.
Its a lot of work. I need to make an entire framework of how to schedule these downloads etc. I'm not even sure of whether this would work from within AWS environment.
A lot of challenges and the thrill of doing it... That's what I live for :)
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