As we discussed in an earlier blog post a few weeks ago, we recently published v0 of our API. After some testing and internal iterations, we’re now delighted to announce that our private beta is live.
We’re currently running our private beta with about 20 companies (fintechs in the personal finance, lending and accounting verticals) in Mexico — our first market. While excitement for Open Banking infrastructure is pretty significant, we purposefully decided to keep the number of companies at a manageable number while ensuring that we had a relevant mix of company sizes, verticals and use cases.
Coverage
What does this private beta include:
- API documentation and starting guide
- Access to online portal to manage test accounts and monitor calls
- Up to 1000 test connections to our API, free of charge, for 45 days
And what are the data sources that are currently accessible in our API? Thus far we have connected the top banks and financial institutions in Mexico:
- Banamex
- Santander
- Banorte
- Scotiabank
- BBVA Bancomer
- HSBC
- American Express
For the time being, only retail accounts are available. We’re working hard to integrate business accounts soon. We’re also integrating more banks and financial providers (i.e. Inbursa, Banregio, Liverpool, BanCoppel, etc.) as well as public service financial and fiscal information providers (i.e. SAT).
And some of the information available from all these sources includes:
- Owners → personal information that can be relevant to validate identity for KYC or other onboarding processes (e.g. first name, last name, address, etc.)
- Accounts → overview of all accounts held by a person with the bank or financial service provider (e.g. checking account, credit card, mortgage, etc.)
- Transactions → granular breakdown of all transactions performed within a given account over a selected time period (e.g. debit/credit, amount, resulting balance, transaction description, currency, etc.)
One of the main difficulties in putting together a stable and reliable API has been to normalise data formats and availability across sources. No matter the institution the data is being pulled out from, our API consistently spits out a homogenous data structure. No two JSONs are the same in terms of content, but the structure sure is.
Next steps
So, what next? We’ll be running these pilots until early/mid November. The idea is to let our clients test our v0, get feedback and iterate on what we have so we can release publicly by the end of the year. By this launch date, any developer building financial technology in Mexico could access the public Belvo API and get set up in minutes: from account creation, to obtaining live data, to monitoring usage. After that, widgets, SDKs in multiple programming languages, intelligence tools, more data sources and countries will follow soon. So stay tuned!
And, it goes without saying that if you’d like to get early access to our private beta, do get in touch with Oriol or myself. We’d be happy to see how we can help your business reach new heights thanks to our Open Banking infrastructure.
And if you’d like to join the team and help us drive Open Banking and the future of financial infrastructure in Latam, we’re always looking for top talent. We’re a small and agile team, close to 10 people now, based in Barcelona and remotely. Lots of interesting opportunities here and more coming soon!
