Show HN: Free, fast bank data merchant extraction API for FinTechs
herondata.ioWe built Heron Data because we experienced first hand the massive time sink of shipping internal tooling to clean up transaction data at our first Fintech.
We don’t want other makers who are pulling data from Yodlee / Plaid / etc. or issuing cards & current accounts to have to reinvent the wheel like we did. We now enrich over 1m transactions each day.
Lots of companies come to us at the idea validation stage while they can’t afford to pay anything. In the past we haven’t been able to help.
We are really happy to launch this free tier today so you can benefit from our cutting edge ML & NER at a lightning fast latency regardless of budget.
If you want a higher rate limit or to leverage our full feature set (which includes recurrence, categories, a Lending Dashboard, and much more), email jamie@herondata.io.
Cheers on this. Seems like it will save massive amounts of lift for data and risk teams. Notwithstanding price, is there a minimum amount of transaction data required to start?
Thanks for the kind words ram13!
Nope - because we have productised all the ML, merchant extraction, and so on you can get started with a single transaction. We scale up with you as you grow and serve customers who see hundreds of thousands / millions of transactions each day.
Are there any plans to include location metadata for merchants with a physical presence?
Not in the immediate future - it is really fiddly and not a core requirement for most of our customers.
If this is critical to your guys' use case, let me know! Happy to consider bumping it up in priority.
Can you elaborate on what I get with the free API?
You get access to our merchant extraction feature which means for a given transaction description, we clean out the aspects unrelated to the merchant (description_clean), attempt to map it to a canonical merchant and, where we can, return a URL, logo / icon, and unique identifier for that merchant. Latency is very low (c200 ms).
There is a rate limit of 1 call per minute. While we provide more enrichments in our paid tiers we hope that smaller Fintechs in the validation stage can leverage this endpoint in production to build merchant based logic and enhance their transaction feed.