importing bank statements

Add my name to the growing list of people who have been exploring ways
to download information automatically from the web, especially when
there is no free OFX direct download service available.

I've done a lot of experimenting too, and would love to pool my effort
into a like-minded project.

In addition to banking, I've been interested in making "programmable"
other sites that make it needlessly difficult for people to get their
own personal data onto their own personal computer.  These include
utilities (phone, electricity) and subscriptions (PDFs, etc.).

One very relevant project that I haven't seen mentioned is "weboob"
(Web out-of-browser):

  http://symlink.me/projects/weboob

Their existing banking support is France-centric, and I find their
slant too misogynistic, but their software is fairly well designed,
written in Python, and capable of being automated.  The code is GPL
(actually, now AGPLv3), so I wouldn't mind contributing to a fork if
any of you are interested in it as a starting point.

The other angle I've worked on, which isn't very well covered by other
projects, is extracting data from PDFs and incorporating it into a
filing system.  For example, with most downloads on my Mac, I'll see
statement.pdf, statement-1.pdf, and so on.  Figuring out its
institution, account, and statement date, removing accidental
duplicate downloads, and filing it away for reference or further
processing ... is tedious without a script to automate the
"ingestion".

So, where are people congregating to work on this?  I notice that
web-banking-assistant was set up on Google Code, though not much has
happened there yet.  Also, the online banking scope, while apropos to
this list, and a superb initial target, is too narrow of a long-term
direction - it's a step away from what I've been doing, viewing
"browser-less automation" as a general problem not unique to banking
web sites.  As long as the scope of discussion doesn't have to stay
limited to banking, I'm "in".

< Lionel