abna VS python-n26

It's extremely hacky and there is barely any automation at all. Everyday at 0500 a cronjob uses https://github.com/djc/abna to fetch the bank balance and makes no effort at all to automatically parse more than the balance. It then compares that with what the balance "should" be according to hledger and sets up a todo item if there is any difference. Somewhere during the day I manually reconcile the two and check off the todo item.

I'm sure it could be smarter with automatic parsing and whatnot, but I actually kinda like the manual action. It makes sure I'm aware of everything happening to my bank account. Time spent per day is actually quite low because it's kept updated and there is never any big backlog of transactions. I would say it takes 2-3 minutes if there are any transactions, or zero ofc if I didn't spend anything.

You can sign up for an N26 account via smartphone app and then use this (unofficial) python library https://github.com/femueller/python-n26

I fully agree with you though, the Open Banking outcome in reality almost looks like a joke. I only found the above as I was searching for a while to find a way to do this that didn't involve building my own screen scrapers to implement.

There are banking offerings in the UK with official APIs however you are looking at £200/month+ in costs.