Jack Henry™ announced it continues to replace inbound screen scraping on its Banno Digital Banking Platform with API connections to all five major data exchange platforms, Finicity, Akoya, Plaid, Envestnet | Yodlee, and Intuit, giving account holders more control of their financial data and protecting financial institutions from a wide range of fraud and security risks that arise from passwords shared with third parties. Screen scraping, while a common practice throughout the industry, presents multiple challenges in both security and customer experience; Jack Henry is on track to eliminate all inbound screen scraping on its Banno Digital Banking Platform by the end of summer this year.

Screen scraping is an automated process that uses bots, web crawlers, and other proprietary tools to log into websites on behalf of account holders using their passwords and credentials. In addition to being a slow and unreliable means of data extraction, screen scraping makes it difficult for financial institutions to distinguish legitimate login attempts from fraudulent ones, leaving systems vulnerable to credential-stuffing attacks and other cyber threats that continue to plague the industry at large.

Replacing inbound screen scraping for the more than 700 banks and credit unions on Jack Henry’s Banno Digital Banking Platform inaugurates a new and more secure era of financial data exchange. Unlike the indiscriminate data extraction performed by screen scraping, open-API aggregation allows accountholders to specify, minimize, and fully control their data and how it’s shared with third-party providers—including the ability to grant or revoke data permissions within their bank or credit union’s digital banking experience.

“This is an important milestone for the industry, and I am in full support of modernizing the exchange of financial data with Jack Henry’s direct APIs to the five major data exchanges,” said Phil Suckow, vice president of innovation at $1.9 billion IncredibleBank. “Ending screen scraping for the more than 9 million end-users on Jack Henry’s Banno Digital Banking Platform will reset consumer expectations, create a new data security standard, and empower the community and regional financial institutions to strengthen and differentiate their service on security and reliability. Leveraging the new API connections to the data exchanges through Jack Henry enables us to continue to be at the forefront in providing open financial data access to our customers.” 

Ted Anastasi, growth team lead at Akoya, added, “The collective goal here is to make financial data access easy and secure so that consumers feel confident using fintech applications. Using APIs as a means of data transfer is a model the industry can use to create more reliable and more secure data sharing. This is a big win for both consumers and open finance.”

“Screen scraping is an outdated, broken process,” said Ben Metz, chief digital and technology officer at Jack Henry. “Sharing passwords is both problematic and prevalent, and this is why the CFPB is scrutinizing screen scraping and proposing new open banking rules later this year. Changing consumer behaviours and expectations is best done at scale. Requiring the use of API-driven, consumer-permissioned data access across our platform will make it easier to recognize and neutralize malicious activity and enable banks and credit unions to minimize fraud and improve their accountholders’ financial health and security. It’s the right thing to do.”

Jack Henry is working with the banks and credit unions on its Banno Digital Banking Platform to make a smooth transition from screen scraping to secure, API-based financial data exchange. Visit jackhenry.dev to learn how to integrate solutions with Jack Henry’s digital banking platform.