Topic: How do the exchanges interface with the banks? (intersango example) (Read 1185 times)

That's exactly how it's done. Every morning I get up, type in my PIN on a card reader to get 10 PIN numbers which I give the CTO.

As for withdrawals, some banks allow you to upload Xml whereas other banks (UK banks are the worst banks) you have to have some javascript and a person pasting it into the address bar, then enter a pin after every xfer. With 2 people, it can be done really efficiently and do a few hundred in a couple of hours. One person presses enter, alt-tab to browser, F6, ctrl-a, paste, enter, type in pin, press enter, repeat. The other person is checking for errors and giving the pin codes. We could have it more automated, but that's risky and more effort because the banks like to change small details with their site every so often.

UK banks:
- High overhead.
- Difficult to keep open.
- Lengthy/poor service & interface.
- Time consuming (spend so much time dealing with UK banks- by contrast EU bank has never caused us a problem).

There are no UK banks with an API. They deliberately hide the API for security reasons (security through obscurity). UK banks are socialist organisations and ridiculously inefficient- a bit of a joke for one of the financial centres of the world!

As far as I'm aware banks will offer business customers an API to download their account data, i.e. list of transfers in, as well as an API to transfer out. Can't say specifically how Intersango do it, but there could be an automatic script using a bank API to create a csv, with cron (my intersango deposit appeared in about 2 hours, that was on a Sunday evening) -- I doubt anyone would go to the bother of downloading csvs every couple of hours...

(Filed under offtopic as I can't see a section for Tech&Dev for stuff outside bitcoind)

I'm trying to figure out how the exchanges interface with the banks.

In:
http://gitorious.org/intersango/intersango/blobs/gbp/bank/import_csv_hsbc.py
from:
http://gitorious.org/intersango/intersango/trees/gbp/bank

I can see that a .csv file is imported and then parsed with:
http://gitorious.org/intersango/intersango/blobs/gbp/bank/parse_deposits_hsbc.py

So I'm thinking...
 does the exchange owner have to export a .csv file every day?

 I can't figure out how the LloydsTSB code does it; I'm not a programmer in any shape or form.

 And for this matter...
is a merchant bank technically essential for an exchange? Perhaps an exchange could receive payments as bank deposits (because non reversible-ish) but payout by another method. Legally a silly thing to do maybe... I don't know, but interesting to know if it's possible. I guess you could even have a one way exchange... assuming taking payments is seen by banks as not suspicious. I'm just thinking about all the hassles the exchanges have had and wondering where those result from.

 2 more questions regards exchanges:

1) Is it true that all USD wire transfers have to go through USA along with identity info, even if it's miles away from the USA, like Singapore?
2) Is there a way to link exchanges together... or perhaps for a bigger exchange like MtGox to do a large trade of Bitcoins for USD on another exchange for example. Many smaller exchanges have the problem of scale.