If you’ve ever built a fintech application that touches bank data, you likely remember the dark ages of financial engineering: screen scraping.

In that primitive era, users handed over their raw banking credentials—usernames, passwords, and multi-factor secrets—to third-party apps. Those applications would spin up headless browsers, emulate human login flows, and parse fragile, unstructured HTML just to fetch a checking account balance.

It was a distributed systems nightmare. It ignored the principle of least privilege, violated zero-trust security postures, and shattered downstream pipelines every time a bank’s web development team tweaked a cascading style sheet or altered an element ID. Worse still, if the intermediary was compromised, the attacker gained full access to the user's primary financial institution.

Today, that anti-pointer is dead.…