Lots of providers exist for bank information, Plaid is one of them. That's what many of these auto import personal finance softwares use.

Having used Plaid, it is essentially web scraping as a service. It's an API built on top of very questionable access. It itself is not a formal API provided to you by the bank.

Yes it is (I never said it wasn't), but it works. They are working with banks to modernize their APIs as well.

The Canadian government has apparently introduced a framework for sharing your banking data securely with third parties (budgeting apps, financial products) in an effort to eliminate this shady screen scraping and credential sharing that a lot of these kind of apps do. Hoping they actually follow through...

https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...