Bank aggregators · acquired

Finicity (Mastercard Open Finance)

Mastercard's US open-finance API for reading consumers' and small businesses' bank, card and investment accounts, mainly for lending and account verification.

finicity.com · founded 1999 [unverified] · Utah, United States (Salt Lake City area) [unverified]; parent Mastercard, Purchase, New York · researched 2026-10-10

Scope: Finicity connects to US financial institutions on a consumer's consent and returns accounts, balances, transactions, account owner details, statements, and verification-of-income and verification-of-assets reports, mostly for lenders and fintechs. It also handles account verification for payments. It keeps no ledger and does no bookkeeping, and it does not let an individual sign up and pull their own data for their own use. It is a pipe, not a record.
Backing: Owned by Mastercard (NYSE: MA). Mastercard's acquisition was announced in June 2020 and closed in late 2020; the commonly reported price, $825M plus up to $160M in earn-outs, was not confirmed against a primary source this session. By October 2026 finicity.com redirects to Mastercard's Open Finance business page.
Serves: enterprise, mid-market, developers
Covers: bank, payments, integration
To ownpurse: Source. A possible US bank source for an ownpurse connector, but only through a business that holds a Mastercard contract; not something an owner can connect to alone.

What it is

Finicity is the US open-finance business of Mastercard. It connects to a consumer’s or small business’s financial institutions on their consent and hands the data to a lender, a payment company or a fintech app. In October 2026 the brand is mostly gone: finicity.com redirects to Mastercard’s Open Finance page, and the OpenAPI spec describes “Finicity APIs” for “US Open Finance solutions, formerly called Open Banking”.

What it does well: verification. Account ownership, income and asset reports for mortgage and credit decisions are its core, and that is where a card network’s reach and compliance budget are worth the most.

How it works

A partner registers on Mastercard Developers and gets a Partner ID, Partner Secret and App Key. The partner swaps those for an app token that the spec says “is valid for two hours and is required on all calls”. The consumer links accounts through Mastercard’s hosted Connect flow. After that the partner reads accounts, balances, transactions, statements and reports from api.finicity.com. The spec says Finicity refreshes active accounts once a day, and that clients may not automate calls to the refresh services.

Data and access

The spec is public (version 1.44.1, Apache-2.0), and so is a free Test Drive sandbox. Production access is by contract, and no price list is published: finicity.com/pricing redirects too. The data is current state. You get balances and a window of transactions, not a versioned history, and there is no export for owners, because the owner is not the customer.

Agents

Mastercard publishes a developers agent toolkit with an MCP server (@mastercard/developers-mcp). It lets an agent list services, read docs and inspect API operations. It does not touch anyone’s account data. An agent that reads bank data through Finicity is just a partner application’s code, under that partner’s contract.

Customers

Lenders, banks, payment processors and fintechs of mid-market size and up. We could not confirm coverage counts or customer numbers this session, because Mastercard’s pages blocked our fetches. Review-site ratings were not reachable either.

History

Finicity was founded in Utah, in 1999 by most accounts (unverified here). Mastercard announced in June 2020 that it would buy it, as the US half of its open-banking strategy. Aiia in Europe was the other half (unverified here). Since then the product has been absorbed into Mastercard’s brand and developer platform. It is the plainest example of a card network owning the bank pipe.

For ownpurse

Finicity is a source in theory and out of reach in practice. A person running ownpurse cannot get production keys for their own accounts. An ownpurse connector to Finicity would need a business with a Mastercard contract in the middle, and that undoes the point of an owner-held record. Two things are worth taking from it. The source decides the refresh cadence. And short-lived tokens come from long-lived secrets. For US banks, SimpleFIN or the bank’s own export is the better path for an owner, and ownpurse’s provenance on each fact should record which pipe a bank line came through.

Data and access

Public API: Yes. REST (JSON/XML), OpenAPI 'Open Finance' spec v1.44.1
Auth: Partner ID, Partner Secret and App Key from a Mastercard Developers account; an app token that the spec says is valid for two hours (renew after 90 minutes)
Limits: The spec says clients may not automate calls to the refresh services; Finicity refreshes active accounts once a day. No published per-call limits were found.
What access costs: Test Drive sandbox is free; production pricing is by contract and not published.
Export: No owner export: a client application fetches through the API what each consumer has consented to.
Notes: The spec now calls the product US Open Finance, 'formerly called Open Banking'. finicity.com and finicity.com/pricing both redirect to mastercard.com.

Price

Model: Enterprise contract, per product and volume
Entry: Free Test Drive sandbox for development
Top: Negotiated
Notes: No public price list; finicity.com/pricing redirects to Mastercard's Open Finance page.

Agents

MCP: official
AI features: No agent features for account data were found. Mastercard publishes developers-agent-toolkit (MIT) with an MCP server, @mastercard/developers-mcp, that lets agents browse services, API operations and integration guides.
Agent writes: No. The MCP server reads documentation only; account data goes through the normal API under a contract.
Approval: Consumer consent at connection time through Mastercard's Connect flow; there is no gate on agent actions because agents take none.
Notes: Mastercard's agentic work (for example Agent Pay) is about payments, not data access [unverified in this pass].

Integration and customers

Connects to: US financial institutions through direct connections and screen scraping [coverage counts not confirmed this session]; delivered through Mastercard Connect, a hosted consent flow, plus REST endpoints for accounts, transactions, statements and reports.
Notes: Reachable only from a registered partner application. A person building their own local tool cannot get production keys without a contract.
Scale: Not confirmed this session; Mastercard's open-finance page returned 403 to our fetch.
Ratings: Not found this session (G2 returned 403; web search budget was exhausted).
What customers say: Not gathered this session. The developer community treats it as the bank pipe behind lending and verification flows, not a consumer product.

Timeline

1999
Finicity founded in Utah [unverified]
2020-06
Mastercard announces it will acquire Finicity [price unverified]
2020 (late)
Acquisition closes [unverified exact date]
2026-10
finicity.com redirects to mastercard.com Open Finance; the spec renames the product US Open Finance

Borrow and avoid

Borrow: The token model (short-lived app token from long-lived partner credentials) and the explicit rule that refreshes are not automated: the source sets the cadence, which is how ownpurse should treat every source's limits.
Avoid: Depending on a card network's pipe for an owner's own data: access is contract-gated, the brand has already been folded into Mastercard, and the owner never holds a copy.

Sources

Not confirmed against a primary source

Founding year 1999 and Utah headquarters
Acquisition price ($825M plus up to $160M earn-out) and exact close date in 2020
Coverage counts (institutions, share of US accounts)
Production pricing and Test Drive limits
Mastercard Agent Pay scope
Aiia as the European counterpart
G2/Capterra ratings (search budget exhausted, G2 returned 403)

On the spectrum

0 to 4. The grey tick is ownpurse.

Custody: 1
Where it runs: 0
History: 1
Openness: 1
Breadth: 1
Autonomy: 0
Agent-ready: 2
Easy to connect: 2
Market: 4

See it on the map

Also in bank aggregators

ownpurse is not affiliated with Finicity (Mastercard Open Finance) or any company named here. Names are their owners' trademarks. Figures come from the company's own pages and the press, as linked, as of 2026-10-10; scores are our reading of them against the definitions in the landscape. This is not legal or financial advice.