Redbark is Now an Australian SimpleFIN Provider

Redbark now speaks SimpleFIN

As of today, Redbark is a native SimpleFIN provider for Australian banks. If you use Actual Budget, Sure, Firefly III, or any other app that supports SimpleFIN, you can now point it directly at Redbark and get live Open Banking data from 100+ Australian institutions. One setup token, pasted once, and your app syncs itself from then on.

This is a big deal for the self-hosted finance community in Australia, so let me explain what SimpleFIN is and why this matters.

What is SimpleFIN?

SimpleFIN is an open, read-only protocol for sharing financial data. Instead of every budgeting app building its own bank integrations, apps implement one simple standard: you give the app a setup token, it exchanges that token for its own private credentials, and from then on it can fetch your accounts, balances, and transactions over a clean HTTP API. The app can read your data, and nothing else. It can never move money, and it never sees your bank login.

In the US, most people use SimpleFIN through SimpleFIN Bridge, which sits in front of American bank aggregators. The protocol has become the default way open source finance apps do bank feeds: Actual Budget ships it as a first-class sync option, Sure built its bank sync around it, and the Firefly III data importer supports it out of the box.

Until now, there was no SimpleFIN provider for Australian banks. That is the gap Redbark now fills.

What this actually means

Redbark implements the SimpleFIN protocol as a server, backed by Australia's Consumer Data Right. In practice:

• Any SimpleFIN app becomes an Australian bank sync app. Actual Budget, Sure, the Firefly III importer, and anything else that speaks the protocol can pull your CommBank, Westpac, ANZ, NAB, Macquarie, ING, Up, or 80+ other Australian accounts.
• The data comes through regulated Open Banking, not screen scraping. Your bank shares data via the CDR through an ACCC-accredited recipient. You never hand your banking password to anyone, and it does not break when your bank changes its website or adds MFA.
• Nothing is stored. Redbark proxies your balances and transactions live from the bank at the moment your app asks for them. We keep no copy of your financial data.
• Each app gets its own credentials. Connect Actual and Firefly side by side, and revoke either one independently from your Redbark settings without touching the other.

Setup is deliberately boring. Generate a setup token in Redbark settings, paste it into your app's SimpleFIN configuration, and you are done. The app links itself once and syncs on its own schedule from then on.

We tested against how these clients actually behave, not just the protocol spec: chunked history backfills, pending transaction flows, stable transaction IDs so re-syncs never duplicate, and the quirks each app has in how it parses the response.

We sponsor the projects we serve

Open source finance apps are a big part of why we built this. Redbark sponsors the development of both Actual Budget and Firefly III, because a healthy open source ecosystem is good for everyone who wants to own their financial data. Serving those communities properly, with a native protocol implementation rather than a bridge script, felt like the right next step.

Getting started

SimpleFIN access is included on the Developer and Professional plans, and every free trial:

1. Sign up for Redbark and connect your Australian bank (about a minute, via the CDR consent flow).
2. In Settings, find the SimpleFIN section and generate a setup token named after the app you are connecting.
3. Paste the token into your app. That's it.

We wrote full step-by-step guides with screenshots for Actual Budget and Sure. For Firefly III, use the data importer's SimpleFIN flow and set a start date so it does not try to fetch history back to 1970.

The protocol details live in our SimpleFIN documentation, and there is more on the SimpleFIN page. If you run an app that speaks SimpleFIN and something does not work against Redbark, email support@redbark.com and we will fix it.