This is a really bad take. Plaid is a 'monopoly' just as much as Stripe is. There is nothing stopping a company from doing the hard work of integrating thousand

This is a really bad take. Plaid is a 'monopoly' just as much as Stripe is. There is nothing stopping a company from doing the hard work of integrating thousands of banks using a single API. Furthermore, the fees Plaid charges are literally pennies, companies like Transferwise use them to do most of the bank transfers and yet still manage to offer the lowest rates for cross border payments. One final point: the future relevance of 'bank integration as an API' companies, such as plaid, is really murky. With the advent of Open Banking regulations, real time national payment systems etc the difficulty of integrating various banks using a single API will be drastically reduced.