Screen Scraping as a Cybersecurity Risk Can Lead to Virtual Chernobyl

Agreed, as the founder at a fintech SaaS which uses multiple bank APIs like Plaid and Nordigen. Screen scraping is not just insecure, but also unreliable and fragile. Most problems I've seen with bank connections happen because screen-scraping based authentication just fails to work in cases where 2FA/captcha or other login security is enabled.

However we still need to use screen scraping sometimes, because there is just no other choice. 90% of the banks in the largest economy in the world, i.e. the USA, just don't have APIs. Also even most APIs in PSD2-compliant Europe don't offer the full range of data, such as payment reference numbers. Until the open banking ecosystem catches up with these customer requirements, we are forced to do screen scraping sometimes.