Thanks Europe for using regulation (PSD2) to open up banking to fintech startups. Would anyone be interested in joining me in championing similar legislation in the US through congressional representatives, the Federal Reserve, and FDIC?

I don't know PSD2 fully but I know that my bank rolled out support for it and as far as I gather, applications should not have to ask for my username/password via their own UI (which after testing Plaid, they do), but rather use the authentication systems from the banks to authenticate. Maybe I used it wrong though.

Your understanding is correct. It's an OAuth2-type mandate for banking services providers.

https://transferwise.com/gb/blog/what-is-psd2

FYI, a lot of banks open banking apis are broken most of the time.

Having said that, for plaid in the UK, they do offer both an open banking integration and a scraping integration for most banks.