A Guide to Open Banking APIs

How Plaid, Tink, and others connect bank accounts and power financial data access.

Open banking has transformed financial data access, enabling apps to connect to bank accounts, retrieve transactions, and initiate payments through standardized APIs.

North America

Plaid leads in North America with broad coverage across US and Canadian financial institutions. Its suite includes Auth (instant account verification), Transactions (categorized transaction history), and Identity (KYC-ready identity data). Plaid's Link flow provides a polished, branded connection experience.

Europe

Tink dominates in Europe, with deep PSD2-compliant connectivity across thousands of banks. Beyond account aggregation, Tink offers Payment Initiation, Risk Insights, and Data Enrichment — making it a full-stack open banking platform.

Yodlee (owned by private equity firm STG since Envestnet's 2025 divestiture) offers broad global coverage with a more traditional financial institution focus. It excels in wealth management and financial wellness use cases.

Embedded finance

For embedded finance, providers like Unit abstract away the bank connectivity layer entirely, offering virtual accounts, cards, and lending through a single integration.

Synapse Financial Technologies, previously a significant provider in this space, filed for bankruptcy in 2024, and end users lost access to funds. In embedded finance the partner bank rather than the platform holds customer deposits, so the deposit relationship and reconciliation model differ by provider.

Self-hosted

Apache Fineract is an open-source core banking engine with a REST API, run self-hosted. Operating it means taking on deployment and upgrades in place of a vendor relationship.

How to choose

The differentiating factors are geographic coverage, regulatory scope, and whether the provider returns raw account data or an enriched, categorised product.