Jack Henry’s Banno Digital Platform for banking now integrates with four leading data aggregation services — Yodlee, Plaid, Akoya and Mastercard’s Finicity. The core provider on Dec. 2 secured its most recent agreement with Envestnet’s Yodlee as a new partner in its digital banking ecosystem.

The four providers are key to an open banking strategy, Jack Henry’s Senior Director of Strategy Lee Wetherington told Bank Automation News. “Those are the four big financial data exchange platforms and networks in the United States and those four entities are the de facto plumbing for open banking in the United States,” he said.

Their services aggregate data and link to fintechs, allowing banks to leverage cloud-based financial services. They can be leveraged through Banno, which is Jack Henry’s Banno Digital Platform that competes with Finastra, FIS and non-core offerings such as MX and Backbase.

Yodlee partners with more than 1,500 financial institutions and fintech innovators, including 15 of the top 20 U.S. banks and over 625 fintechs, Brad Nightengale, Envestnet | Yodlee’s senior director of data strategy, told BAN.

“Our infrastructure allows for secure access through APIs and tokenization, so that consumers can more reliably and effectively connect to their data through the over 1,500 third-party applications in our ecosystem,” Nightengale said. “The root of Envestnet | Yodlee’s partnership with Jack Henry is bringing forward a solution that gives consumers improved access to and control of their financial data. Open banking is essential for giving banking customers the power to make connected, actionable, and intelligent financial wellness decisions, while also taking advantage of even greater security and account connectivity.”

Offering these four connection services helps banks and credit unions fight against what Wetherington calls “the modern problem of financial fragmentation,” which is when customers must access multiple financial apps to obtain a complete view of their finances. It’s not unusual for Gen Y or Gen Z to have between 30 and 40 different financial services providers, he added.

“The average consumer now in the United States — their financial picture is more unclear than it’s been in quite some time because it’s more fragmented across all of these different financial apps,” Wetherington said.

In the past, the only way to bring all that data into one place was through screen scraping, which is unreliable and easily broken, he noted.

Data aggregation platforms provide connectivity that can make banks and credit unions “home base” for a complete financial picture, Wetherington said. These platforms provide a standardized, secure API-based hub for exchanging data between banks and credit unions on one hand, and non-chartered financial type apps and entities and syntax on the other, he said.

“That’s desperately needed these days, to be able to give to a consumer at a bank or credit union the ability to have a complete and holistic picture — a window — onto all of their finances across what is otherwise a fragmented landscape of one-off apps that they have on their phone,” Wetherington said.

If the bank or the credit union can make those relationships transparent within their own digital app, then that bank or credit union can become the “first app,” or go-to app for all a customer’s money-related needs, he added.

Partnering with these data aggregators is part of Jack Henry’s strategy to leverage open banking, Wetherington said.

“We recognized a long time ago, at Jack Henry, that even as a company of our size and scale, we can’t possibly innovate on our own fast enough to meet every need of every bank and credit union, as needs shift quickly,” he said. “We know that for community financial institutions to thrive and to remain viable, they need to have both the strategic and technical agility to integrate, and partner at will, with third-party providers.”

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