After years of FinTech companies site-scraping bank websites, we’re finally seeing APIs. Plaid now lets you go to Chase bank directly, log in, and get secure, reliable, API access. And as those much needed APIs came, the industry now has several “decacorns” and a longer list of unicorns.

FinTech APIs came later than others, but experienced a growth spurt shocking even to the tech industry. And while we’ve seen well-designed APIs that adopted good standards already present, differences and inconsistencies between FinTech APIs show that these APIs aren’t at the quality they could be. FinTech API businesses are debating internally what standards and designs work best - formats, user representations, etc - all the while, ensuring security and privacy in APIs where stakes are higher.

We’ll highlight differences among successful APIs in the space to identify the open questions that lead to more solid standards for the FinTech space.