[ceejayoz]

Plaid, when able, uses OAuth or similar APIs; they (and all the other financial aggregators) use screen scraping only when that's not a possibility. A lot of the big banks have already made a deal with Plaid in this regard.

If you have a Capital One or Citi account, both use a direct integration.

[lxgr]

That doesn't solve the problem of Plaid granting access to an absurd amount of financial details to their users (i.e. the companies to which I'm "verifying my bank account").

My account number is fine (and the entire point). My balance and last n transactions? That's just absurd and shows both how broken the US retail banking landscape is in many aspects, and the level of Stockholm syndrome exhibited by a large fraction of their depositors.