Scrapegators, what’s that? According to Malauzai Software, that’s the term used for vendors that “scrape” digital banking apps on the internet to gather data and then provide that data to fintechs. In other words, they are aggregators. Think Mint, Yodlee and Intuit, who, according to Malauzai Software’s Monkey Insights February 2018 report, are the largest scrapegators in the U.S.
Scrapegating is a direct result of the advent of open banking and APIs in the banking industry. According to the Malauzai report, scrapegators point to another important change in the banking ecosystem. That change being that increasingly more and more consumers are relying on non-banking apps to meet certain banking needs. Think P2P apps or PFM apps.
Although the report suggests that 93% of users that use these fintech apps also use their banking apps. The report shows that about 7% to 10% of users do not return to their banking (or credit union) apps. That’s a pretty significant number, if as a bank you have millions or at least a few hundred thousand users.
According to the report, these non-returning consumers “have moved away and are getting more value from someone else.”
Malauzai’s Chief Product Officer, Robb Gaynor, said in the report:
The bottom line is that consumers are choosing to use third party applications, not their Internet Banking sites. This trend is highly significant given the advent of the movement towards Open Financial API’s; everyone’s talking about it. Banks and credit unions better get a handle on this trend or it will continue to drive a wedge between them and their customers/members. They must find ways to align interests with the fintechs, this is the real opportunity.
For the report, which was released earlier this week, Malauzai used data from January consisting of 400 banks and credit unions, spanning over 16.9 million logins from 895,000 active Internet and mobile banking users.
Read the full report here.







