Plaid

Zach Perret and William Hockey founded Plaid in San Francisco in 2013, at a time when US banks offered no open interfaces. The workaround was blunt: users typed their online-banking credentials into the app, and Plaid logged in on their behalf and scraped balances and transactions. It worked very well and was exactly as uncomfortable from a security standpoint as it sounds; a class action over the data collection settled for $58 million.

Visa agreed to buy the company for $5.3 billion in 2020. The US Justice Department sued, arguing Visa was buying out a future rival, and the deal was dropped in January 2021. Plaid has since moved to negotiated API connections with the big banks instead of scraping.