Fidel vs Brex API: Which is best?

Heron doesn't offer account aggregation but 75% of our customers do leverage account aggregators in order to provide world-class financial services. We are often asked to recommend the best API to get bank transactions, so we want to share the feedback we hear on the different options.

Here we'll be comparing Fidel against Brex API. Fidel is best for real time rewards for credit cards, while Brex API is stronger for connections to the Brex card. Here are the key differences.

The pros of Fidel are:

Realtime data
Live Merchant Category Codes
Great for rewards

However there are some drawbacks:

Only works on card data

And the benefits of Brex API are:

Easy to integrate
Has Merchant Category Code data
Returns clean transactions

But again there are some drawbacks:

Only connects to Brex so coverage is very low

No account aggregator has perfect coverage and great connectivity. When selecting your first vendor, it probably makes sense to go for the one with the best coverage for your target population (coverage varies between business and consumer accounts). If all goes well and you end up building a big business you should be ready to build software to:

Ask customers which institutions they want to connect to
Route your customers to different account aggregators based on the institution they select
Have a hierarchy e.g. Fidel, Brex API as a fallback, and Yodlee as a reserve

We specialize in normalizing and deriving insights from raw transaction data pulled from any aggregator. So if you would like tailored recommendations of what provider to choose, book a demo.