Data aggregator Plaid has launched an open-banking platform for lenders in a bid to promote the use of APIs and secure data exchange among financial institutions, regardless of their size, the company announced today.

Plaid Exchange allows lenders and wealth management firms to manage the secure data connectivity of their customers’ financial lives, even if they are still using core legacy systems. The platform is outfitted with various tools FIs can use to connect with the 3,000 fintechs and 10,000 banks plugged into Plaid’s network.

The San Francisco-based Plaid facilitates the sharing of consumer data between banks and third-party companies. In January, Visa announced its $5.3 billion acquisition of the company, which works with fintechs, including Venmo, Square and Acorns.

“A lot of banks want to move from the existing integrations that companies like Plaid have built into an API integration,” said John Pitts, Plaid’s global head of policy, noting the company had interviewed more than 100 banks during the new platform’s one-year development. However, “there are real barriers to moving to this kind of API connectivity for banks, both in-house expertise and also cost,” he said.

Building an API for financial data sharing is a three- to four-year process costing between $10 and $20 million per year, according to the banks working with Plaid. “For a lot of banks, that’s just not sustainable as a project,” Pitts said, adding that time can be shaved down to as few as 12 weeks on the Plaid Exchange platform.

The price to adopt Plaid Exchange can be flexible, Pitts said. “Our value is in the value of the network we support, not in charging a bank for data access,” he said. As Plaid onboards more clients to its network, that connectivity becomes more robust, and this is enough of a motivator that Plaid Exchange does not need to be a revenue generator. “The approach we’re taking is, any bank that wants to implement Plaid Exchange can — and we are not going to let cost be a barrier to it. For some small community banks, we will give it to them for free, if they want it.”

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Some of the tools on the platform include tokenization to establish secure and robust connectivity and a white-label tool to build customer control centers that give customers visibility and control over how their financial information is shared. Already 21 organizations have signed onto the platform as early-implementation partners who provided feedback throughout the testing and development phases.

As more consumers turn to fintech apps and online banking, banks are accelerating their digital roadmaps and, for many, data access is a critical component. In fact, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase recently told Bank Innovation that the banks are looking to invest and expand their open-banking strategies.

“We have had more engagement from banks over the last three months who are accelerating their own digital strategies than we’ve had over the last year,” Pitts said. “A lot of them are saying to us that they’re trying to do two years’ worth of digital strategy in the next two months because they have to,” he said, adding that on the consumer side, one in four U.S. bank accounts has already connected to an app via Plaid, and fintech app usage has skyrocketed by more than 72% in the last three months.

“As banks become more like fintechs and accelerate their own digital strategies — and as fintechs start to become more like banks — we saw a need and heard from a number of bank partners to move to an even stronger and more robust network for data sharing that they could build their digital strategies on,” Pitts said.