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I've never understood what motivated financial institutions to grant Mint access to account transactions and balances? Did pre-acquisition Mint somehow reach a tipping point in active users where financial institutions decided their customers would choose other banks if theirs wasn't accessible through Mint?

Are there other competing tools that have similar reach connecting to financial institution accounts?

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The financial institutions never gave mint access. What happened is that mint takes a users username and password then logs in as that user and downloads (or scrapes) the transactions.

Nowadays it’s a bit more integrated with the banks, with oauth support etc. but initially they were basically just scraping.

And yes, this is a massive security hole and likely against the banks TOS (deliberately giving your credentials to a third party).

A bunch of people in this thread complain how integration has gotten way worse over the years. I'm pretty confident this is banks "fighting back" with 2-fa and other additional security measures--many seem to have the goal of locking out these kinds of services. A very few seem to be embracing it (they have a token system that have revokable read-only access).

Personally, I'm looking to move banks/credit cards towards services with better integration at the expense of other things like better returns.

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