When Plaid originally launched, their value proposition was much higher-quality connections to the top dozen or so most popular institutions in the United State

When Plaid originally launched, their value proposition was much higher-quality connections to the top dozen or so most popular institutions in the United States - fewer data quality issues and better integration with MFA than you could get by screen-scraping. Since those banks have about half the bank accounts in the US, that's pretty nice. They later started supporting long-tail banks (the 15,000 or so other institutions in the United States), although without the same data-quality advantage as they have for the big banks. From the perspective of a new startup, Plaid also has a much more modern API and treats documentation as a much higher priority than most of their competitors - you can get up and running in an afternoon, which is absolutely not the case for every provider in the space. Plaid also had much better support, at least in the early days - level 1 support was a native English speaker with deep technical knowledge of the product, level 2 support was a founder of the company.