UK challenger bank Mondo has released its first set of developer tools to early test users of its digital banking account, promising to make it easier for non-developers to create their own banking apps.
Mondo shipped its first 500 live MasterCard pre-paid debit cards and associated iPhone app in 'Alpha' mode to 500 users in January.
The neo bank, which is aiming to shake up the market for the delivery of banking services in the UK, has been running a series of internal hackathons with third party developer teams to hone its API and create a number of pre-built applications ahead of the full-scale release.
Now available with an OAuth2 flow, the API will let any Mondo customer quickly download and manipulate their own data, says Mondo co-founder and CT Jonas Huckestein
"Anyone should be able to play with their own banking data, not just developers," he says. "We want to make it as easy as possible for anyone to access their data, export it or analyse it without any prior programming knowledge. We’re working on some integrations at the moment that should make this really quick and easy."
Although still in the early prototype stage, he says the firm has big plans for the API, including enabling developers to build applications that can request access to other customers’ data on an individual basis.
Says Huckestein: "For example, in the future you could make an accounting app that connects to Mondo and customers could authorise you to access their account to extract their expenses."
Acknowledging concerns around data privacy and security, Huckestein says: "We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to build applications that leverage our customer’s banking data without compromising the safety of our users. We should have an update on this within the next 2-3 months so watch this space."