Open shared plumbing for financial data
Tony Xiao, founder and CEO of Venice, on the opportunities in financial data aggregation
This points to a market where the bottleneck is no longer just getting one API contract, but filling the long tail of missing and unreliable bank connections. Venice is designed as a shared plumbing layer, where a fintech integrates once, routes users to Plaid, Yodlee, or another provider based on coverage, and can add its own connector when none of them work, instead of rebuilding login flows, credential handling, and retry logic from scratch.
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The practical problem is coverage, not branding. Plaid and Yodlee overlap heavily, many long tail connectors are sourced from the same underlying infrastructure, and important institutions can still be unsupported or fail most of the time. That is why teams end up stacking multiple aggregators and custom imports.
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Open source matters here because the hard part is the surrounding infrastructure. Building one custom connector is manageable. Rebuilding secure credential storage, routing rules, user interface, and normalization around that connector is the expensive part. Venice turns that one off fix into something the whole network can reuse.
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The strategic backdrop is that raw aggregation is getting commoditized. As bank APIs standardize and competitors resell similar coverage, the durable profit pool shifts upward into enrichment, risk, and payments. That makes an open connector layer more plausible, because the proprietary edge in basic connectivity is weakening.
If this model works, financial data starts to look more like shared developer infrastructure and less like a closed vendor silo. The winners will be the companies that sit on top of that access layer and turn messy account data into concrete outcomes, like better underwriting, easier reconciliation, and cheaper money movement across more institutions and geographies.