Wells Fargo Strikes Deal With Plaid to Share Customer Bank Data

Wells Fargo & Co. plans to share customer information with Plaid Inc., a data company that connects banks to thousands of financial-technology applications.

Certain Plaid customers will begin receiving the data through Wells Fargo’s application programming interface, or API, within a year, according to a statement from the San Francisco-based bank Sept. 19. When consumers sign up with fintech companies such as Betterment LLC, PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo and Coinbase Inc., those firms use Plaid’s connections to financial institutions to display bank balances and authenticate accounts.

Companies like Plaid have sparked a bigger discussion in the banking industry about ...