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Wells Fargo Open Banking APIs integration

Ivan Dimitrov

Published Nov 2023

Wells Fargo is a US based international financial institution operating in 35 countries and serving over 70 million people worldwide. Source

They provide an Open Banking API for usage with custom-made business credit cards like the Watches of Switzerland credit card.


Technical overview

Integrating Open Banking APIs requires many security and legal precautions. There is always a double layer of encryption for all APIs and communications (even emails).

Many of the specifications and examples are proprietary or lost in the mountains of documentation provided by the bank. For that reason I will not go into too much detail about the use cases as I’m not sure what I am allowed to talk about.

One use case documented on their website is the API Keys endpoint.

To generate an API key you need your client credentials with a key and a secret in this format Authorization: Basic base64(consumerKey:consumerSecret) as well as the scope in the form grant_type=client_credentials&scope=accounts. There are hundreds of scopes to configure. This gives you an access_token which is valid for 24 hours, has the scopes (permissions) you requested and is used for most API communications.