Load TrueLayer data to DuckDB

TrueLayer is an open banking platform providing APIs for account information, payments, and financial data access. Everything needed to build a working TrueLayer → DuckDB pipeline is on this page: the API's base URL, authentication, endpoints, pagination and incremental field — plus a prompt that hands the whole job to your coding agent.

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Build your TrueLayer to DuckDB pipeline

Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.

PromptCopy prompt
Run uvx dlthub-init@latest to build a pipeline from TrueLayer to DuckDB and run it on dltHub

That scaffolds a dltHub workspace and installs the dltHub AI harness — the project rules, the secrets-management skill, and the dlt MCP server your agent needs to work safely. From there it reads the TrueLayer API, proposes the endpoints to load, then writes, runs and validates the pipeline while you review rather than type. Credentials are inspected through MCP tools, so your agent never reads secrets.toml itself. How the LLM-native workflow works →

Prefer to write it yourself? Every fact the agent uses is below.

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TrueLayer API at a glance

These values come from the TrueLayer API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the TrueLayer API?

TrueLayer uses OAuth 2.0 to generate an access token, which must be passed in the Authorization header as a Bearer token. Some endpoints also require a Tl-Signature header for request signing.

1. Get your credentials

1. Create an account on the TrueLayer Console (https://console.truelayer.com/).\n2. Navigate to the dashboard and select or create a new application.\n3. Within the application settings, view your 'client_id'.\n4. Generate a 'client_secret' within the application settings; you must re-authenticate with MFA to do this. Store the generated secret securely, as it is only displayed upon creation.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.truelayer_source]
access_token = "REPLACE_ME"

dlt reads this file automatically at runtime. With the harness, the setup-secrets skill prompts you for the values and never handles the raw credential in chat. For production, see setting up credentials with dlt.

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What TrueLayer data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the TrueLayer endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new TrueLayer records?

TrueLayer exposes cursor on data/v1/accounts/{account_id}/transactions, so dlt can request only the records that changed since the last run. Set it as the cursor_path and dlt tracks the high-water mark for you between runs.

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{"name": "account_transactions", "endpoint": {
    "path": "data/v1/accounts/{account_id}/transactions",
    "data_selector": "items",
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "cursor", "initial_value": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z"},
}}

On the first run dlt loads everything from initial_value; on every run after that it requests only what changed and appends with write_disposition="merge" if you set a primary key. See incremental loading.

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What does the generated TrueLayer pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading /connect/token and /data/v1/accounts from the TrueLayer API into DuckDB:

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import dlt
from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources

@dlt.source
def truelayer_source(access_token=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://api.truelayer.com",
            "auth": {"type": "bearer", "token": access_token},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "account_transactions", "endpoint": {"path": "data/v1/accounts/{account_id}/transactions", "data_selector": "items"}},
            {"name": "card_transactions", "endpoint": {"path": "data/v1/cards/{account_id}/transactions", "data_selector": "items"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_truelayer_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="truelayer_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="truelayer_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(truelayer_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_truelayer_to_duckdb()

Run it with python truelayer_pipeline.py. The agent iterates on this until it loads cleanly — you review and approve, rather than write it from scratch.

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How do I query TrueLayer data in DuckDB?

dlt creates one table per resource. Query the loaded data with Python or SQL — or ask your agent to, through the MCP server's execute_sql_query tool.

Python (pandas DataFrame):

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import dlt

data = dlt.pipeline("truelayer_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.account_transactions.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM truelayer_data.account_transactions LIMIT 10;

See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.

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How do I deploy the TrueLayer to DuckDB pipeline in production?

The pipeline runs locally, which is ideal for prototyping and one-off analysis. When you need it on a schedule, monitored on every load, and shared with your team, deploy the same dlt code on the dltHub platform — no infrastructure to maintain. The prompt above already ends with "run it on dltHub", so your agent can take it there directly.

• Deploy & schedule — run the pipeline as a managed job with automatic retries.
• Monitor — observable job queues, alerting, and load metrics for every run.
• Transform — promote raw TrueLayer loads into governed, documented models.
• Visualize & share — explore data in notebooks and publish live dashboards instead of static screenshots.

Book a demo →

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What other destinations can I load TrueLayer data to?

dlt loads into any of these — only the destination argument changes:

Set dlt.pipeline(destination="snowflake") and add credentials in .dlt/secrets.toml. On the dltHub platform the same pipeline runs against a managed Iceberg lakehouse. See the full destinations list.

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Next steps

• Ready for production? Book a demo of the dltHub platform →
• dlt LLM-native workflow docs
• REST API source reference
• Join the dlt community on Slack