Wells Fargo plans to share customer information with portfolio company Plaid, a data company that connects banks to thousands of financial-technology applications.
Companies like Plaid have sparked a bigger discussion in the banking industry about consumers’ ability to share their data with outside apps. Banks want other companies to use their API instead of using a practice known as screen scraping, which often requires consumers to share their bank username and password so the outside app can log in and gather information. The APIs give lenders more control over what data is distributed and how it’s released. But startups and other firms say those restrictions sometimes prohibit them from providing certain services.