Quickstart

Welcome to the Teller Quickstart. Here we will begin by introducing you to some key concepts and finish up by linking your first financial accounts to Teller.

Introduction

This guide uses the examples repo from our Github, which contains simple, pre-made applications for you to get up and running and experimenting with Teller as quickly as possible.

tellerhq/examples

Grab your application id from the Application Settings page on the Dashboard. Your application id is how Teller Connect identifies which application it will be enrolling accounts for.

Next, you will need your Teller Client Certificate. A certificate and private key were created for you when you signed up for your Teller account. Check your downloads folder for teller.zip, which contains the certificate and private key created during sign-up. If you've misplaced your certificate or private key you can revoke your certificate and create a new one on the Certificates section of the Teller Dashboard.

Just as your code uses our TLS certificate to verify it's really us on the end of the line, Teller uses client certificates so we can verify it's you that is making each API call.

Setting up

Let's start by cloning the repo and running it on our local machine.

# Clone into the examples repo
git clone https://github.com/tellerhq/examples.git
cd examples/python

# Run the example application
make run app_id=YOUR_APP_ID env=sandbox cert=/path/to/cert.pem key=/path/to/private-key.pem

Congratulations, your app is now running in the sandbox environment! The sandbox is a free and unlimited test environment that enables you to simulate connections with various types of financial accounts without the need for real financial accounts. The sandbox does not connect to real financial institutions.

You can make the application connect to real financial institutions by running it in the development environment.

Linking your first financial account

All API requests interact with an enrollment, which is a Teller term equivalent to an end-user login at a financial institution. An end-user may have accounts at different financial institutions, which they can connect to your application by creating an enrollment for each institution. An enrollment is not the same as an individual financial institution account, although every financial institution account is associated with an enrollment, and it's common for an enrollment to have multiple financial accounts associated with it. For example, an end-user may have a checking account, a savings account, and a credit card all with the same financial institution; this would correspond to a single enrollment with three related financial accounts.

Open your browser and navigate to localhost:8000 and click the "Connect" button. You should now see Teller Connect, the UI we provide for end-users to safely and securely connect their financial accounts to your application.

Select a financial institution and use the following sandbox credentials to enroll:

User: username
Password: password

Finally, choose which accounts you want your application to be able to access.

Congratulations, you have successfully created your first enrollment! Now you can click the buttons that correspond to the various Teller API operations and see the data returned by the API.

Why not restart the application in development and try linking one of your own financial accounts?