[phoenixy1]

Oooh, this is relevant to my interests! Some banks do have APIs -- U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Chase are a couple that spring to mind off the top of my head -- but in general they are not really aimed at developers building for specific consumer use cases, which kind of makes sense, since most people don't want to build, say, a budgeting app that only works with their own bank. A more typical customer of these APIs is fintech platform companies like Plaid that will work as a middle layer and make this data accessible via a more standardized API. (Full disclosure: I work at Plaid. We also have our own open API standard, Plaid Exchange, but obviously not every bank is using it.)

Anyway, to answer the question, since it would be something just for my own bank it would be a service that I would use for myself, rather than something that would be a business. So, this is small, but a few months ago I was trying to find a good way to split the rent with my boyfriend, and even though it seems completely bonkers, in the year of our lord 2021 I still cannot find a service that will allow me to make free, recurring, peer-to-peer electronic payments. (My bank offers free peer-to-peer electronic payments with Zelle but doesn't provide recurring functionality; and they offer free recurring bill payments to individuals but only via check, not electronically.) So I might build that.

[eaplant]

That last part really blows my mind. You would think that recurring outbound transfers would be totally common right now.

I totally agree that Plaid makes sense, but it frightens me a bit that you have to give your username and password to Plaid.

[phoenixy1]

I know, right? I tried Venmo, PayPal, my own bank...none of them offer it. Even though my bank is one of the biggest banks in the country that has a great online banking portal and my boyfriend and I bank at the same place.

Not everybody is going to be comfortable providing credentials to a third party, I totally understand...but that is what's generally required in the US banking system for API access to bank accounts at multiple institutions, for better or for worse. If it makes you feel any better, we do have info on our security practices (https://plaid.com/safety/) on our site as well as a portal (my.plaid.com) to manage preferences and delete information. We're also committed to moving 75% of our traffic to bank APIs by the end of 2021 and launching OAuth-based authentication for a few big banks in the US soon (so that you don't have to give us access to your credentials at all) -- maybe yours will be one of them! :-)