Connecting a bank account without signing away the keys

A bank connection is genuinely useful. You can fund an account without typing a reference, pay directly from your bank, and prove your income without printing six months of statements and carrying them somewhere.

It is also the permission people give with the least attention, on a screen designed to be clicked through.

Three questions worth asking

Of any service asking to connect to your bank:

1. What exactly are you going to see?
2. For how long?
3. How do I stop it, and where is that button?

A service that cannot answer all three plainly has told you something about how it intends to use the answer.

Scoped and time-limited

The consent names what is shared and for how long, before you agree, and you can read it again afterwards rather than relying on memory of a screen you saw once.

Open-ended consent — everything, forever — is the industry’s default and it should not be.

Revocable where you are

Revoke it in the app.

Not by finding a buried page on your bank’s website. Not by emailing support and waiting. A consent that is hard to withdraw is not a consent; it is a signature you cannot take back, and the difficulty is usually deliberate.

Income without documents

Verifying income through the connection means you do not upload bank statements — which also means nobody has to store those statements, and nobody can later lose them.

The safest copy of a document is the one that was never made.

Reading is not collecting

A mandate — permission to collect money from your account on a schedule — is a separate consent from reading the account.

They are kept separate deliberately. Agreeing to let a service see your balance should never quietly include letting it take money, and anywhere those two are bundled into one tick box, somebody has made a choice you would not have made.

What it costs

Linking is free. Where paying by bank carries a charge, it is shown before you confirm.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• Consent is explicit, scoped and time-limited rather than open-ended.
• It can be revoked from inside the app, not only on the bank’s site.
• Income verification uses the connection rather than asking you to upload documents that then have to be stored somewhere.
• A mandate for recurring collection is a separate consent from reading the account, because they are different things.

What it costs

Linking is free. Where paying by bank carries a charge it is shown before you confirm.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: Bank connections on the features page.

Read next

• Adding money — Nothing appears until something arrived.
• Credit readiness — Your history, shared on your terms.
• Identity and tiers — Start with a phone. Grow into the limits.