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Open banking

Open banking is the third way to record transactions in Clatri — after chat and statements. You connect your bank once and transactions arrive automatically via webhook, without you having to download anything.

What it is and why it matters​

Historically, your bank info was locked inside your bank. If you wanted another application to read your transactions, the options were scraping (a program simulating you logging in to the portal) or entering credentials in third-party services — both insecure, brittle, and unauthorized.

Open banking changed that. Financial regulators in several countries require banks to expose official APIs that let authorized applications read your transactions and balances, always with your explicit consent. The premise: your financial data is yours, and you should be able to share it with the services you choose.

  • The UK pioneered open banking regulation in 2018.
  • The European Union followed with the PSD2 directive, which obligates all European banks to expose account-access APIs.
  • The US and Canada have mature ecosystems with providers like Plaid that connect thousands of banks.
  • Latin America is at another stage — see below.

How it works in Clatri (Plaid)​

Clatri uses Plaid as its provider. Plaid is a certified intermediary that connects applications with banks. When you connect a bank:

  1. Clatri opens Plaid's secure interface inside the app
  2. You select your bank and enter your credentials directly into Plaid — Clatri never sees or stores your bank credentials
  3. You select which accounts you want to connect
  4. Plaid establishes the connection and starts delivering transactions and balances

From there, updates arrive via webhooks: when your bank reports new movements, Plaid notifies Clatri and the system syncs automatically. It's not continuous real-time, but you don't have to do anything manually either.

Per-transaction decisions​

Every transaction that arrives via Plaid goes through the same engine as a statement:

  • Duplicate detection — if you'd already recorded the expense manually or by previous statement, it reconciles with the existing one instead of creating a new one.
  • Internal-transfer detection — if the same transaction appears as outflow from one account and inflow into another (e.g. payment to your own card), it collapses as a transfer.
  • Contact and group association — the system tries to infer counterpart and group based on the description and your contact directory. Details are in Statement processing.

Token encrypted at rest​

The access token Plaid generates for your connection is stored encrypted on the server with the same encryption scheme as your financial information. If at any point you revoke the connection from the app or from your bank's portal, the token stops working immediately and the system marks the connection as inactive.

Availability and cost​

Today the Plaid integration is enabled for banks in the US and Canada. As Clatri acquires more users, Plaid can grant us access to its banks in the UK and Europe — the infrastructure on their side already exists.

Each connected account costs 300 credits per month — the detail is in Pricing. If you pause the connection, charging stops until you reactivate it.

Latin America​

For Colombian and Latin American banks, automatic integration is one of the most important medium-term goals. The obstacle isn't technical — it's regulatory and infrastructural. There's no open banking provider today with regional coverage comparable to Plaid, and banks in the region aren't required to expose standardized APIs.

Brazil moved ahead with its own open-banking framework; Colombia published the open finance decree, but practical implementation — Colombian banks exposing functional APIs — is still in development. In most countries in the region there's no global provider in the Plaid style, and banks don't have a practical obligation to open their data.

When regulation advances and viable providers emerge — or Plaid expands coverage — Clatri will integrate them. Meanwhile, bank statements and chat logging cover that role.

What open banking does NOT do​

To avoid wrong expectations:

  • It doesn't move money for you — Clatri reads your transactions but doesn't initiate transfers, payments, or investments. The connection is read-only.
  • It doesn't replace your bank's app — you still need your app to make transfers, pay your card, or request products. Clatri is an aggregator and analyzer, not a transactional channel.
  • It's not real time — webhooks arrive when the bank reports to Plaid (can be seconds or several hours after the actual transaction). It's much faster than waiting for the monthly statement, but it's not instant like checking your bank app directly.