Three banks, one report

The spark

It all comes from a post by Cristian Correa that showed up on my LinkedIn. I didn't know him, but what he had done caught my eye: he built a CLI for Bancolombia to organize his finances from the terminal. I was on Holy Week, in Chitré, and I decided to save it because something inside me had lit up.

Once I got home, I went back to his project to build something similar for my bank. I work in banking, so the first step was a CLI for Banistmo — a terminal tool that could authenticate, list accounts, view transactions, check balances. Version 0.0.1. Red letters on a black background. Nothing pretty. Everything functional.

I got excited being able to pull my transfers and the rest from a terminal. And there I connected something: my obsession with credit cards.

Three cards, one problem

I currently use 3 banks, which I won't name, mostly because I'm a credit card maniac and I use one for every promo it gives me to squeeze out the most value possible. Keeping track of 3 cards is hard even for me. Three billing cycles. Three different apps. Three different ways of presenting the same information.

And I said: let's make this big. So I started, in my free time, to try to do it for my other 2 banks. The solution wasn't a better app from one bank. The solution was a system that connected them all.

The ordeal

And from there came an ordeal, because every bank works differently. Each one has its own structure, its own authentication flow, its own way of showing transactions. And without open banking, getting access to your own data becomes that hard.

There are no APIs in Panama for accessing your own bank information. We're simply far behind in this regard. Doing some research, other countries do have it, and it'll be vital for when the AI revolution knocks on our door.

I ran into bugs, but each one taught me a little more. Every bank was a world that had to be deciphered separately. Until I got it working.

The result

I built a system where Archy — my AI agent — could enter my 3 online banks at the same time, pull my transactions, and give me a daily report of how my spending is going so I stay alert.

Now every day at a set hour, Archy sends me a summary of how my spending is going for the month, with a trend and advice on how to close out the month properly. On Telegram it's the quick summary, with alerts if anything breaks the pattern:

And by email, the full detail in case there are personal-finance alerts — breakdown by card, monthly cash flow, spending categories, the most important charges of the cycle, and observations:

From three disconnected apps to a single report. From not knowing how much I had spent to having a projected month-end before I finished breakfast.

Banks have to change

Thousands of banks keep competing on who has the better online banking, who shows the data more nicely, but none of them are aiming at the open banking that's going to be vital for this new era of AI. And it's fine to compete on who has the best app — but they're competing in the wrong game.

As Freddy Vega wrote in his book Control:

"This constant acceleration of reality means standing still is the same as moving backwards."

Open banking isn't a tech luxury. It's the infrastructure this new era needs. Without it, every person who wants something more than "see my balance" has to reverse-engineer their own online banking. That shouldn't be necessary.

I love learning and creating. With AI now, I feel I always have something to build, something to optimize in my life. If you're still waiting for the perfect tool to come to you, you've already lost the race.