The article correctly points out that Plaid helps avoid the whole challenge deposit problem, which is a real source of issues in US banking. What this misses,

The article correctly points out that Plaid helps avoid the whole challenge deposit problem, which is a real source of issues in US banking. What this misses, and what everyone forgets, is that Plaid didn't invent this concept of using bank logins to verify account ownership. As far as I know, this was Yodlee's innovation. But anyone who has used Yodlee will tell you their API was designed by people who hate software developers, so an opportunity existed for someone to help businesses do bank account validation using sensible APIs - e.g. Plaid. Banks have known about Yodlee (and now Plaid) for years. Some approve of them, even making it easier for them to recognize account numbers for validation. Others do not approve of them, and in some cases the tools have to do crazy things like downloading bank statements and parsing account numbers out of PDFs. But the banks have no real choice but to tolerate the existence of these tools because there's no better system in the US. Getting banks to work together on interoperability is a harder problem than tolerating a set of centralized and well known tools that use account logins for a well understood validation purpose. These tools have a job to do, everyone in the ecosystem understands what that is, and everyone puts up with it for lack of a better option.