rmesters

Hi HN, I'm Rolands - cofounder of Balsio (previously BirdyChat).

Some of you may remember us from January, when BirdyChat became the first app to go live with WhatsApp interoperability under the EU Digital Markets Act: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746476.

Since then we renamed to Balsio, added workspaces for teams and made the app more agent-friendly.

/ The problem we're solving: Many small teams in Europe run their work on personal chat apps. They're OK for critical communication, but they are not built for work - personal and work chats get mixed, other people see your personal phone number, group chats have no threads and they get noisy quickly, no schedule send, limited possibilities to integrate your tools, etc. We don't think that personal chat apps will get any better for doing work in the future and so we decided to build Balsio.

/ What we do: Balsio is a free work chat built and hosted in the EU. You sign in with your work email and that becomes your username. You can message your team and people at other companies using their email addres. You can also message WhatsApp contacts directly from Balsio.

You can add agents to chats through our API. Separately, you can connect your own AI (Claude, ChatGPT or anything that supports MCP) to your account so it can read and write on your behalf.

/ Tech details: - Backend is Elixir - Clients: SwiftUI for iOS and Mac, Jetpack Compose for Android, React for Web and Windows app - Service hosted in Europe - Interoperable with WhatsApp

/ Current limitations: - WhatsApp chats only work in the European Economic Area, only for one-to-one chats, and only on iPhone, iPad and Android. Group chats are on our roadmap - The WhatsApp contact has to turn on "Third-party chats" in their WhatsApp settings before you can message them - You can't create agents inside the app yet, our users need to bring their own agents to the app through the API

/ Business model: The product is free. We plan to charge larger companies for additional features like single sign-on, more data storage and advanced user management.

/ Feedback I'm looking for: 1. If you have built agents that work in chat, is there anything you're missing in other communication apps that you'd like to see to improve your agent experience? 2. If you run a small team or company, what agent use-cases (besides coding and customer support) do you have or have seen?

Thanks!

Last year when Apple acquired UK open banking startup Credit Kudos there was a lot of speculation on how Apple was going to use the open banking data technology.

Frankly I’m quite excited to see Apple use it to advance their financial health tracking capabilities.

With the bank account data APIs now being available across Europe, I hope we’ll see Apple roll this out in more countries.

GoCardless has an API that’s connected to 2.3k banks in Europe and UK.

Free to use (up to a limit). Not open source though.

Link: https://gocardless.com/bank-account-data/

[I work at GoCardless]

The article does not mention this, but much of the fraud can be removed by switching to bank payments (eg open banking payments) or by using the likes of BNPL.

It’s nuts how much effort goes in to trying to make credit cards work for the internet when they clearly were made to serve a different purpose.

Nordigen (nordigen.com) | Latvia (Riga) | Python Developer, Product Owner | Hybrid Remote (in Latvia)

Nordigen is an open banking platform - we help fintechs to connect to consumer and business bank accounts in Europe for banking data. We're a team of 100 people based in Riga.

Apply here: https://careers.nordigen.com/#section-jobs

I'm one of the founders.

Depends. There's a bunch of providers (eg Yodlee) that ask for bank credentials (previously on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655712) Akoya in US and most European providers use real bank APIs.

Here's two free solutions you can use for bank data sync (Nordigen & Saltedge): https://docs.firefly-iii.org/data-importer/install/nordigen-...

Shameless plug: OP mentioned Plaid as a way to sync bank accounts, but if anyone wants to use a Plaid alternative in Europe, check out Nordigen (it's free).

Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders.

It's happening already: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/39905/cma-writes-to-bar...

Unfortunately, this is still common in Europe: https://sifted.eu/articles/open-banking-finance-battle/

In U.S. most "open banking" is still done via asking people to share their banking passwords.

Open banking (the actual regulated type in UK and EU) replaces (1) the need to rely solely on credit bureau data to understand someone's creditworthiness, which is often faulty or incomplete (2) the need to share paper/PDF bank statements (3) the need to share banking credentials with tech companies that do "open banking powered by screen scraping".

Because open banking is regulated, consumers now have a layer of protection that they didn't have before. And more people can prove their actual creditworthiness (as opposed to whatever credit bureaus think their creditworthiness is).

Full disclosure: I'm a cofounder of Nordigen, a freemium open banking platform. Views biased.

Congrats on the launch - what you've built is incredibly cool. When do you plan to add European investment accounts?

I cofounded Nordigen (Plaid competitor in Europe) and we use PSD2 bank connections, which are great for payments data but do not cover investment data, which is less than ideal. Aggregating OAuth APIs for European brokerages would make so much sense.