Capsule 005: Open Banking & Data Layer

Almost every finance tool you use offers to “connect your bank,” and almost every operator clicks through it without knowing what they’ve actually granted, who they’re really trusting, or what happens three months later when the connection quietly stops working. That last part isn’t a bug — it’s a deliberate security feature almost nobody has been told about, and it’s the single most common reason a working cash forecast or benchmark silently starts showing the wrong numbers.

This Capsule is the foundation every other live-data Capsule in this catalogue assumes is already in place. You’ll understand what Open Banking actually grants — read access to your own transaction data, nothing more, entirely separate from moving money — who’s really doing the connecting behind the scenes, and what each field in the data that comes back genuinely means. You’ll connect every account a business actually holds, not just the obvious one, and set up the habit that catches a lapsed connection before it quietly costs you.

By the end, you’re not just connected — you have a foundation the rest of this catalogue can simply assume is correct. The cash forecast, the DSO benchmark, any decision-grade dashboard: all of them run on exactly this feed. Get it right once, log it properly, and everything built on top of it just works.