As a developer that works in the fintech space, I work a LOT with the Plaid API and their competitors like Finicity, Akoya, TrueLayer, SaltEdge and Yodlee. Thi

As a developer that works in the fintech space, I work a LOT with the Plaid API and their competitors like Finicity, Akoya, TrueLayer, SaltEdge and Yodlee. This industry has basically been the Wild West in the United States for the past decade or so. Europe has regulated open banking where banks are required to provide APIs with enforced limits and restrictions on data usage. The US has no such thing, most banks don't have APIs, these aggregators pull data by screen scraping, which is horrendous for security AND reliability (Plaid/Finicity calls fail about 10% of the time in my experience.) Fortunately the industry is now rapidly moving away from this mess towards more sane OAuth authentication with contracts between Aggregators like Plaid, and apps like mine, enforcing legal limitations on how the data can be used and providing some standard of security. The big US banks have formed a consortium (Akoya) which both provides a unified API without requiring credentials and scraping, and guidelines on how to protect the data, both legally and technically. Exciting times!