As far as I know that’s pretty much what it is yes, a bunch of per-bank scraping systems, which get updated when the bank decides to switch things up.

IIRC Yodlee and Mint do (did?) about the same thing, for banks without a formal API.

From my understanding in recent years Mint uses a lot more of the Quicken/QuickBooks semi-formal APIs when formal APIs don't exist. My understanding is that is one of the few, biggest benefits of Mint being bought by Intuit because that 200-pound gorilla has always had a surprising number of special read only APIs and export dump tools from even the quirkiest, smallest banks because of how ubiquitous their tax software is (and how many users would rebel if they didn't have easy access in Quicken or QuickBooks).

This is one of my (numerous) top complaints about Plaid. From the start they’ve been more about working against than working with banks, and that’s sort of obvious still today.

My credit union doesn’t give a flying fuck about Plaid and it’s a constant cat and mouse game that amuses me to watch. My credit union doesn’t have a path to online banking without per-session MFA.

I think banks should be required to provide a user-opt-in OAuth API for read-only access, but not so that companies like Plaid can pilfer your data.

> From the start they’ve been more about working against than working with banks... At the very beginning sure, but very quickly Plaid built out a team to try and work with banks. Banks were the biggest roadblock to OAuth, most banks have (had) zero appetite to provide a good experience for users to delegate programmatic access to their own user data. Banks see user financial data as their own and _not_ belonging to their users (as it legally does).

However Plaid has made in-roads at many large institutions, and now supports OAuth, or OAuth-like, access at all (nearly all?) major US financial institutions.

Plaid never liked working against banks, that just made everything worse for everybody involved.

> My credit union doesn’t have a path to online banking without per-session MFA. This obviously kills async products at Plaid, like continuous transaction data, but doesn't block sync products like Auth (account and routing data).

In fact, Plaid made a huge push to increase the amount of MFA encountered on their platform. When banks or credit unions didn't offer MFA, or didn't allow users to enforce MFA on every login, Plaid would attempt to force it through a variety of mechanisms to ensure a bad actor would encounter MFA on Plaid even if the bank would otherwise let them through their actual website.