Mono API

Overview

Mono is an API platform that enables programmatic access to customers' financial accounts across various institutions in Africa. Launched in 2020, its core offering focuses on facilitating open banking functionalities, allowing developers and businesses to retrieve financial data with user consent. This includes transaction history, account balances, and identity information, which can be critical for applications in lending, personal finance management, and digital payments.

The platform is particularly suited for fintech companies, financial institutions, and e-commerce businesses operating or expanding within the African market. For example, a lending platform might use Mono's API to analyze a loan applicant's bank statements for underwriting purposes, assessing income stability and spending patterns. A personal finance application could integrate Mono to aggregate a user's financial data from multiple banks into a single dashboard, providing a comprehensive view of their finances. E-commerce platforms might use it for identity verification during onboarding or to facilitate direct bank transfers for payments.

Mono offers several products, including Connect, which establishes secure links to bank accounts; Statement Pages, for simplified bank statement retrieval; DirectPay, for initiating bank-to-bank payments; and Percept, an analytics tool for financial data. These components are designed to serve different aspects of financial service provision, from data acquisition to payment initiation and insights generation. The API infrastructure supports a variety of use cases, from fraud detection based on transaction patterns to automated reconciliation for businesses managing large volumes of transactions. Mono's developer experience is supported by detailed documentation and SDKs for popular programming languages, aiming to streamline integration for a diverse range of development teams. Compliance with standards like PCI DSS and NDPR indicates a focus on data security and privacy, essential for handling sensitive financial information.

Key features

• Connect: Securely links user bank accounts to applications, allowing access to real-time financial data with user consent. This feature serves as the foundation for retrieving account balances, transaction histories, and other banking information.
• Statement Pages: Provides a streamlined method for users to securely share their bank statements directly with businesses, often used for loan applications or financial assessments.
• DirectPay: Enables businesses to initiate direct bank-to-bank payments, bypassing traditional card networks. This facilitates recurring payments, bill payments, and transfers directly from a customer's bank account.
• Percept: An analytics product that processes raw financial data into structured insights, assisting businesses with decision-making in areas like credit scoring and fraud detection.
• Identity Verification: Allows businesses to verify customer identities by cross-referencing information from their bank accounts, enhancing security and compliance during onboarding.
• Transaction History: Access to detailed transaction data, including dates, amounts, descriptions, and categories, useful for budgeting, accounting, and expense tracking applications.
• Account Balances: Provides real-time and historical account balance information, enabling applications to display current financial status or monitor changes over time.

Pricing

Mono offers a Developer Plan for initial exploration and testing, with paid tiers for extended usage. The Growth Plan is designed for scaling applications.

For more detailed information on feature inclusions and specific pricing models, refer to the official Mono pricing page.

Common integrations

Mono's APIs are designed for direct integration into various applications and systems. While explicit third-party integration guides beyond SDKs are not provided, its core functionality facilitates integration with:

• Lending Platforms: Integrate Mono to automate credit assessments by pulling bank statements and transaction data for loan applicants.
• Personal Finance Management (PFM) Apps: Connect to user bank accounts to aggregate financial data, categorize transactions, and display net worth.
• Accounting Software: Enable automatic reconciliation by syncing transaction data from various bank accounts directly into accounting platforms.
• E-commerce Platforms: Utilize DirectPay for bank transfers as a payment option or for identity verification during customer onboarding.
• Digital Wallets: Power top-ups or withdrawals directly from linked bank accounts.

Alternatives

• Plaid: A global open banking platform, offering similar financial data aggregation and payment initiation services, primarily focused on North America and Europe.
• Okra: Another African-focused API platform providing financial data, identity verification, and payment services, positioning itself as a direct competitor in the region.
• OnePipe: An API infrastructure provider that allows businesses to embed financial services, including account linking and payments, into their applications across Africa.

Getting started

To begin using Mono, developers typically sign up for an account, obtain API keys from their dashboard, and then use one of the provided SDKs or make direct HTTP requests to the API endpoints. The process generally involves authenticating users and then fetching their financial data.

Here's a basic example using the Node.js SDK to initialize Mono and retrieve account information, assuming you have already obtained the MONO_SECRET_KEY and initialized a Mono client:

const Mono = require('mono-node');

// Replace with your actual secret key from the Mono dashboard
const mono = new Mono(process.env.MONO_SECRET_KEY);

async function getAccountDetails(accountId) {
  try {
    // Assuming 'accountId' is an ID obtained after a user successfully connects their bank account
    const account = await mono.getAccount(accountId);
    console.log('Account Details:', account.data);

    const transactions = await mono.getTransactions(accountId);
    console.log('Account Transactions:', transactions.data);

  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error fetching account details:', error.response ? error.response.data : error.message);
  }
}

// Example usage (replace with a real account ID after successful connection)
// getAccountDetails('60a7d9f2d0116e00311f67f2');

This Node.js example demonstrates how to fetch basic account details and transaction data after a user has connected their bank account through Mono Connect. The mono.getAccount() and mono.getTransactions() methods abstract the underlying API calls. Further details on connecting user accounts via the Mono Connect widget and handling webhooks for real-time updates are available in the Mono API reference documentation. For security best practices regarding API key management and webhook security, developers should consult the Google Cloud API key best practices, which offer general guidance applicable to securing any API integration.