Wells Fargo inks data-sharing agreement with Envestnet Yodlee

Wells Fargo has signed an agreement to enable API-based secure data sharing with aggregator Envestnet Yodlee, allowing customers to securely share data with 1,400 third-party financial applications

Why should we care?
The agreement is a mark of progress towards eliminating a practice known as screen scraping, which is a form of credential sharing whereby a third-party app copies and saves a user’s login information which allows it to connect to their account data. The Yodlee partnership comes a year after the bank entered into a similar agreement with aggregator Plaid, which works with 15,000 banks and 80% of the largest fintech companies. According to the bank, with the implementation of the Yodlee agreement, Wells Fargo now has confirmed plans to transition 99% of current third-party screen-scraping to an API-based data exchange. Large U.S. financial institutions say they’re entering into partnerships with aggregators to promote secure data sharing. But some industry practitioners (including some fintechs) claim the banks are taking a heavy-handed approach and that customers should decide how their data is shared.