Bank transactor database

Question

I see mint.com can identify what company performed a transaction on my checking account, and the company's typical product category. I presume this information is derived from a financial transaction's transactor/description field.

Is there a free, public database or API I can use to do the same thing in my programs?

Answer 1

I really doubt that kind of data is available free of charge, I'd expect it to be provided by a specialist company at significant cost.

Answer 2

No, there's unfortunately not. Mint used Yodlee previously who supplied the category information while Mint did that parsing on the transactor/description field. Mint now uses Intuit's in-house financial data aggregation service.

Too bad there's not an API for categorizing transactions outside of paid services. At least there's not one that I know of.