Thinking about parallels between the industry I work in and fintech. Recently I was curious about how Mint broke open as the go-to money manager, especially on the technical front. From reading through Mint’s history, it looks like the part I was most interested in (the connectivity) came through a separate data aggregation company, Yodlee, until their acquisition in 2009. I also didn’t make the connection that the API economy golden child Plaid was in this same space.
This sparked my interest to know more about the overall history and landscape of this vertical. I’ve taken some notes below. Curious for more thoughts/input from people who know more. I took a pass at detailing the front end of the developer experience by running through their docs, but would be interested about data quality and backend tech (is one doing more APIs and another more screenscraping?)
Yodlee
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General – Founded in 1999 and the OG of this space. Went public in 2014 and acquired by Envestnet in 2015.
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Pros – Pretty strong support (the largest breadth?) across financial institutions
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Cons – Seems like it was selling a lot of data without consent. Some articles mention it being more expensive. Seems like Envestnet doesn’t know what to do with them as it’s no longer the wild west and they can’t monetize the data like they used to.
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Technical (Developer Experience)
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API documentation is nice enough, but a little confusing and cluttered
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The flow for account linking is not API based anymore and requires their wizard
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The authentication being JWT before but now auth token generated after auth call with client credentials and a user (sorta OAuth2 with different headers?) is a weird switch (APIs seem to be heading in the opposite direction in general).
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Seems like a pure REST API. Fine, but nothing special
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They have Swagger and Postman package but only a Java SDK. Swagger is Swagger 2.0, so a little dated.
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Pricing
Finicity
Plaid
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General – Founded in 2013 when the founders got fed up with existing offerings. Acquired competitor Quovo in 2019 to shore up access to investment accounts. Bought by Visa in January.
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Pros – Really solid reputation (I’ve heard of them but didn’t fully grok what they were doing) as developer-friendly/good support. More geared towards startups. It sounds like they somehow drastically upgraded their coverage of institutions in 2019 (not clear how exactly – switch to Oauth only?)
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Cons – Kinda curious about the cons
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Technical (Developer Experience)
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Their API documentation is great. Visually appealing. Quickstart leads you through their concepts and then their actual API has a ton to play with.
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The flow for account linking is not API based and requires their wizard.
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I was actually really confused by their API authentication process and generally their data structure (why call them Items?). client_id, public_key, public_token, access_token, asset_report_token… just a lot of unique concepts to grok. I did like their JWT webhook approach.
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Not REST – all POSTS. Webhooks, which is awesome.
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Official SDKs for Node.js, Python, Ruby, Java, and Go. Community SDKs for Python,Haskell, and .NET. A bunch of example apps. No Swagger/OpenAPI but that’s not surprising given they’re using webhooks (which OpenAPI only recently started to conceptualize)
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Pricing
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Similar to others
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MX
Other names in the space
Quovo – Competitor of Plaid that focused on investment accounts. Plaid bought them to round out their offering.
Intuit – Used to offer an open API until 2016. Finicity mostly took that market share.
Xignite – I see some older references to this company positioning itself as the “cloud API”. This must have been an attempt in the heydey of “what is cloud” but they don’t seem competitive now.
Kontomatik – Their name was on a few older posts. Their API isn’t open (“contact us to learn more”) so I didn’t explore a ton.
CashEdge – Founded in 1999, acquired by Fiserv in 2011. Don’t seem to still be around.
Sila – I don’t think they really play directly against the groups above, as they seem to be crypto, but they are SEOed to high hell around all the Google searches I was doing.
Other summaries or interesting info:
Tom Noyes on this year’s acquisitions
