Scraping Open Banking Data: PSD2 APIs and Screen Scraping

The European PSD2 directive opened banking data to third-party providers, creating a massive opportunity for fintech developers. But what happens when official APIs fall short? Screen scraping fills the gap. Understanding the PSD2 Landscape PSD2 requires banks to expose Account Information Services (AIS) and Payment Initiation Services (PIS) through APIs. However, many banks provide inconsistent implementations, rate-limit aggressively, or lag behind on compliance. Scraping public-facing banking portals can supplement official channels for market research and competitive analysis. Setting Up the Scraper First, install the required libraries: pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas Here's a scraper that collects publicly available banking product data: import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import pandas as pd import time class OpenBankingScraper : def __init__ ( self , api_key ): self . session = requests . Session () self . base_url = " http://api.scraperapi.com " self . api