Sessions
How Reconbanker logs into your bank and keeps the connection alive.
Sessions
A session is one Reconbanker login to your bank. Each account chooses how that session behaves: how often it opens, how long it stays open, and how login is handled when the bank asks for a second factor.
These choices are independent. You can have a persistent session that logs in with assisted 2FA, a one-shot session that logs in unattended, or any other combination.
One-shot versus persistent
Every account picks a session_type. It controls the lifetime of the bank connection.
| One-shot | Persistent | |
|---|---|---|
| Lifetime | Opens, scrapes, closes. | Stays open, monitors continuously. |
| Cadence | Periodic — runs on a schedule. | Always-on, reacts as transactions appear. |
| Login cost | One full login per cycle. | One login when the session starts. |
| Best for | Banks that tolerate frequent logins. | Banks that rate-limit logins or where you want near real-time detection. |
| Default | yes | no |
You can change session_type at any time from account settings. The next scrape picks up the new behaviour.
Simple versus assisted login
Every account also picks a login_mode. It controls what happens when the bank asks for a second factor (SMS, push notification, captcha) during login.
- Simple — Reconbanker logs in unattended with the stored username and password. Use this for banks that do not enforce 2FA at every login, or that offer an app password or read-only token that bypasses the prompt.
- Assisted — Reconbanker pauses during login and waits for a human to complete the second factor inside the bank's page. Once 2FA is satisfied, the session continues normally. There is a timeout: if no operator completes the step in time, the login fails.
Assisted login is what makes 2FA-enforced banks reachable. Pair it with persistent if you want one human-completed login to keep working for a long time.
Skip-on-fatal protection
If a session fails with an error Reconbanker classifies as fatal — bad credentials, the bank reporting the account is locked, repeated unrecoverable login failures — Reconbanker stops trying. It marks the account as blocked (scrape_blocked_at, scrape_blocked_reason) and refuses to enqueue further scrapes until an operator clears the block.
The point is to avoid hammering the bank with bad logins and triggering an actual account lockout on the bank's side.
To unblock: fix the underlying cause (update the credentials, talk to the bank), then press Run scrape now in the account view. Under the hood that calls POST /accounts/:id/restart, which clears the block and re-enqueues a fresh scrape.
Next
- Account settings — the toggles, including
session_typeandlogin_mode. - Connect a bank — when to pick which session type during setup.
- Reference → Accounts — the API fields and the restart endpoint.