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.
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.
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 (now part of Envestnet) offers the broadest global coverage but with a more traditional financial institution focus. It excels in wealth management and financial wellness use cases.
For embedded finance, Unit and Synapse provide a different model — they abstract away the bank connectivity layer entirely, offering virtual accounts, cards, and lending through a single integration.
The key decision factors are geographic coverage, regulatory compliance requirements, and whether you need raw data access or a more managed, enriched data product.