The Aggregators: How Apps Read Your Bank Accounts

An Audio Series

The Aggregators: How Apps Read Your Bank Accounts

Three companies read your bank accounts so an app doesn't have to. One almost sold to Visa for five billion dollars. One sold to Mastercard for less and quietly won two of the biggest brokerages in the country anyway. One is owned outright by the eleven banks it was built to serve.

Three parts Listen in order Education, not advice

All three episodes are now live. This is a companion series to the account-aggregation explainer already published elsewhere: the same category of company, three specific businesses, told through their founding, their money, and who their own websites actually claim as clients. Nothing here is a recommendation to use any of these companies or invest in any of them.

Plaid: The Aggregator Visa Tried to Buy

Visa offered five point three billion dollars. Then it didn't pay.

Two ex-consultants, seventy rejected pitches, and a hackathon prize that became the category leader. The Visa deal, the antitrust suit that killed it, and why Robinhood, not Chase, is the clearest client Plaid actually claims.

Finicity: The Number Two Mastercard Bought

Mastercard paid 825 million dollars for a 21-year-old budgeting company.

An envelope-budgeting app from 1999 becomes the aggregator Fidelity and Charles Schwab both chose directly, settling the real fight for second place against a better-funded rival that still can't name a single brokerage client.

Akoya: The Network the Banks Built Themselves

Thirteen owners, and eleven of them are banks you'd recognize on sight.

Not a venture-backed startup. A data network Fidelity built, then handed to a consortium of the largest U.S. banks. Why the industry's biggest players decided the safest vendor was themselves, and how all three companies in this series answer the same question differently.