A lot data exists in PDF only

At Canopy our first preference is to get data as an API (or datafeed) from the custodian.

Unfortunately a large number of custodians (especially in Europe and Asia) are not yet able to provide investments data as APIs and only provide their regular monthly statements (which are provided in paper or PDF)

Therefore to get data from banks who do not offer APIs, Canopy has developed the ability to take these monthly bank statements directly as a data source. We prefer electronically generated PDFs or ePDFs (i.e. the ones downloaded from the bank's website) but can also handle Print PDFs (i.e. scans of paper statements).

Interestingly about 86% of in investments data in Europe and Asia is available in PDF format only (this number is around 15% for North America)

Banks statements have very complex tables

Multilayer column headers and nesting are the key issues

Benchmarking of Canopy PDF Extraction to Adobe Acrobat