I work on a web/app-based personal finance tool, and just to clarify a few things regarding data aggregators (third parties that aggregate your financial data i

I work on a web/app-based personal finance tool, and just to clarify a few things regarding data aggregators (third parties that aggregate your financial data into personal finance apps like Plaid, MX, Finicity, etc). There tends to be two main ways these aggregators interface with banks. The first is via screen-scraping or reverse-engineering internal APIs. The second is via direct integration (ie Oauth-type connections). Understandably, a lot of the HN-crew is skeptical of "handing over" their credentials to third parties, but for Oauth integrations, it's worth noting that: - you're redirected to the bank to enter your credentials (ie the third party never gets a chance to see them) - often, you get to choose which permissions to allow (ie read vs write, read only, which accounts) - the banks have signed off on the integration So even if you decide you're not comfortable with the screen-scrapes / internal APIs because you don't trust the aggregators, worth considering the direct ones.