Finance apps that can pull from banks across Europe, Australia, US - does this exist?

Software
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Been on the hunt for the perfect portfolio / finance app that works across countries. Specifically I want something that can connect to banks in Australia, Europe (specifically Germany) and US.

Mostly this means that the app needs to connect with data aggregators that are dominant in those areas, so:

  • Plaid: US
  • SaltEdge: Germany/Europe
  • Yodlee: Australia
  • GoCardless: Also Germany/Europe

The only apps I was able to find that can even come close were:

  • Banktivity (not a great UI)
  • Pocketsmith (less coverage than Banktivity)

But both of these have their own flaws, and also donā€™t support some of the most popular options in Europe for example.

Other options that look promising but probably need me to write my own data connectors are Actual Budget and FireflyIII

So I figured I just ask here: Is there an app like this? That can truly integrate with everything?

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Xero might be an option - Why weā€™re calling 2024 'the year of the US bank feed' - Xero Blog

No idea what their German bank feed capability is though. Their bank feeds are often more secure than what Pocketsmith is happy to use.

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I am currently subscribed to both Banktivity and Pocketsmith after being a YNAB user for nearly a decade.

First, to answer your question, I think thereā€™s only Monarch.

Secondly, for my feedback being Australian and not being able to use YNABā€™s integrated banking feeds ever and having to manually enter, and switching to apps that do use the integrated onesā€¦

I have found that my adherence to my budget was far higher when I was using Excel or YNAB as I had to manually input each transaction (done once a week) and reconcile that with what I planned to spend. With both Banktivity and Pocketsmith, I get a great overview and Iā€™ll reconcile my transactions every now and again, and can view my portfolio across multiple financial institutions.

I found those apps (which arenā€™t cheap) far too passive for me to actually change or manage my accounts in any meaningful way. Nice graphs and summary reports etc. but nothing that really got me to manage my money. The more automated my portfolio, the less I actually spent thinking or planning which meant missing opportunities and overspending on budgets.

Iā€™m genuinely stumped on what to do, as I like the nice plug ins and data connections to save me massive time, but the autopilot means auto-spend. Pocketsmith has sankey graphs for your spends which are amazing and really good communicative tools, but they really just show that I spent to much on eating out or apple products and not enough on savings goals.

Fundamentally, are you using it to budget or to track a broad multi-national multi-institutional portfolio, as Iā€™m starting to think that the 2 may not belong together.

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For budgeting and planning Iā€™ve found YNAB to be great. Their bank feeds for the UK are solid, and I think theyā€™ve added more European banks. Unfortunately they donā€™t appear to have support for Australian banks yet. I would assume their US bank feeds are ok depending on which bank youā€™re with.

For tracking and investment reports etc, MoneyDance or Banktivity, although Iā€™ve found MoneyDance to be better for investment reporting for my needs. MoneyDance has a CSV import add-on so itā€™s very quick to do a quick CSV export from YNAB and then import into MoneyDance. Thereā€™s also a quote loader plugin for MoneyDance that pulls all the latest price feeds.

Banktivity is OK; I donā€™t subscribe any more as I found it to be quite buggy day-to-day and some of the reports werenā€™t suitable for me - I could never get it to do a proper UK capital gains tax report, whereas MoneyDance can handle that ok.

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Moneydance with UK bank feeds is exactly what Iā€™m waiting for ā€¦ the wait is just so bloody long! I agree, the investment tracking and capital gains in MD is top drawer. I love the reminders based ā€˜budgetingā€™/forecasting a well. I just canā€™t live with manual import.

Iā€™ve been on Banktivity for a year and have just renewed. I do like it, it handles all my UK bank feeds and investments fine. It does not handle UK crypto prices. I like the reporting when it comes to budgets / general banking but not so much on the investment side. So, yeah, I like it but as soon as MD (FINALLY) delivers UK bank feeds I will move back to MD.

Iā€™ve looked at Firefly but the lack of investment tracking is a deal breaker for me.

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For what itā€™s worth, although YNAB doesnā€™t natively support Australian banks Iā€™ve had success with using Bank Sync For YNAB (and there is an alternative, though I canā€™t recall the name off the top of my head).

That might round out the built-in EU/US feeds enough, provided YNAB offers the combination of features you are after. :slight_smile: Howeverā€¦you may find multi-currency handling to be lacking, unless something has changed in recent years. (Again depending on your use case; multiple budget files within one account might be an answer.)

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Thanks for all the comments! Iā€™ve looked into the options listed here

  • Monarch: Seems to be only US and Canada, so no EU or Australia from the looks of it
  • Xero: More for small businesses but havenā€™t tried it
  • YNAB: I know EU stuff is supposed to be supported? But I canā€™t find any of my banks, not even stuff like N26 which integrates with almost everything

I contacted Banktivity about support for additional banks that I need, mainly C24, Trade Republic, Vivid, Trading212. They got back to me that C24 and Vivid are on their roadmap, the rest currently isnā€™t.

I more or less gave up at this point and started homebrewing my own solution. I was already using https://moneymoney-app.com on my Mac which integrates through PSD2 with almost everything in Europe, but more importantly: It allows building of custom integrations through lua extensions.

While not ideal, I built an integration for Pocketsmith, to have all my account data from pocketsmith in MoneyMoney which covers a bunch of Australian and US banks.

My pocketsmith subscription then expired and I could renew it just so I have a data API for those banks, but ended up not doing that. Instead, I built an integration for Frollo, which is an Australian account/budget tracker.

This solution sadly doesnā€™t work on mobile, but at least on Mac I have almost everything in one place now.

The only thing missing right now is a US data API, maybe through Plaid if they approve my account.

My own verdict for the services that exist:

Banktivity is probably king when it comes to integrations, and if I didnā€™t need TradeRepublic and European Trading212, this would be very close to doing everything I want. Not happy about their pricing model and lack of month-to-month subscription.

I wish they had an API to either add stuff programatically so that I can add the few missing pieces, or to let me access my own data, but they donā€™t do that.

Pocketsmith lacks too many integrations that I need, and Iā€™m not a fan of the UI. But, they have an API and more importantly, allow you to access all your data that they pull for you.

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Check out Lunch Money (Use this link for an extra month free trialā€“ 2 months total).

Been around since 2019 and support many European banks (no UK) for automatic syncing via Plaid. We also have a strong developer ecosystem building bridges to other bank aggregators that open up possibility of bank syncing to UK banks and other non-Plaid support institutions. Iā€™m the founder (hi!)ā€“ feel free to reach out if you want early access to these third-party solutions!

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Wanted to report my experiences back here

Still using my MoneyMoney + aggregator through Lua scripts combo, but I re-investigated some other options under a new

Pocketsmith actually has an API that allows data import form anywhere. So I was able to write importers for custom stuff that just calls the Create Transaction endpoint and have those run automatically on my server. Thatā€™s great!
Doesnā€™t look like assets/investments are properly supported yet though.

Toshl Finance is another service that can aggregate across different countries, but support far less institutions than pocketsmith. I like the UI a bit more, and they also have an API that enables custom adding of transactions. So this makes it possible to shovel data from anywhere into it, similar to Pocketsmith.

In my testing, automatic rule adding isnā€™t really possible the same way that it is on Pocketsmith. Or at least I wasnā€™t able to properly set it up.

Lastly, I revisited Banktivity again. I think itā€™s the best ā€œall-in-oneā€ package that supports the most amount of institutions. But for the ones that arenā€™t supported, there is no way to automatically add stuff to it. Some people had success writing the sqlite database directly but I didnā€™t go down that path yet.

I also noticed weirdness where the reported balance on Banktivity isnā€™t reflecting the actual bank balance (especially on stocks), probably because of some mismatch in internal calculation. It also feels a bit clunky, outdated and slow at timesā€¦

So yeah, if youā€™re looking for something similar to what I need, my recommendation (in order):

  • MoneyMoney + Lua extensions
  • Pocketsmith + custom importers through the API
  • Banktivity

(Iā€™m also looking at Actual Budget, but that doesnā€™t support multi-currency yet. Once thatā€™s added Iā€™ll give it another shot.)

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