In July 2025, JPMorgan told the data aggregators a sentence that ended a decade of free plumbing: the bank would start charging for access to its customers' account data. The aggregators — the companies that move balances, holdings, and transactions from banks and brokerages into the apps and advisor platforms people actually use — had built their businesses on the assumption that the pipes were free. They are not anymore. And the bill is now landing on the wealth management industry's data layer, the least visible and most consequential piece of its infrastructure.

The rule that was supposed to settle this

The fight has a regulator at its center. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Section 1033 open-banking rule, finalized in October 2024, required banks with $850 million or more in assets to share account data and banned fees for doing so. A bank and two bank trade groups sued. In 2025 the bureau stayed the rule and began a rewrite that revisits the fee ban. That July, JPMorgan told aggregators it would start charging for data access. Plaid renewed its JPMorgan agreement with a pricing structure in September 2025 and kept customer contracts and pricing unchanged — but the direction of travel is unmistakable. The largest bank in the country has decided its data is a product, and the aggregators are now negotiating as buyers rather than guests.

The scale of what moves through these pipes explains why the fight matters. Plaid repaired 6,121 broken bank integrations in 2025, with 52 percent fixed automatically by another app in the network, and most of its data now arrives through bank APIs that Plaid helped banks build. Its network reaches more than 12,000 institutions. Envestnet's Yodlee, the enterprise incumbent, listed more than 12,500 data sources and counted nine of the fifteen largest US banks as customers. Plaid's consumer-fintech model — free to start, no contract, public documentation — carried it to more than one in two people in the US with a bank account. The wealth management technology market is valued at approximately $31 billion in 2026 and growing at more than 14 percent a year toward $64 billion by 2031. The data layer underneath it is where the margin is now being negotiated.

The great reshuffle

The ownership of the data layer is changing hands at the same time as its pricing. Envestnet agreed in June 2025 to sell Yodlee to the private equity firm STG, to focus on wealth technology — a quiet admission that the aggregation business it bought for about $590 million in enterprise value in 2015 had become a different company than the one it wanted to run. Its Data & Analytics segment, which held Yodlee, reported revenue of $174.5 million in 2022 and $150.9 million in 2023 on a recast basis. Then, in April 2026, Morningstar announced it was selling ByAllAccounts — the default aggregation answer for advisors — to Pello Companies, a buyer that came out of stealth for the deal. The deal died. On June 25, 2026, Morningstar emailed RIAs that the transaction would not close, confirming the termination publicly but declining to explain, citing a nondisclosure agreement with Pello. ByAllAccounts remains a Morningstar product that its owner publicly tried to sell and could not.

The pattern is consistent: the old enterprise aggregators are being repriced, the consumer aggregators are moving upmarket, and the bank-owned answer — Akoya, created and owned by major banks and brokerages, API-only and tokenized by design — is waiting in the wings. Plaid is preparing an IPO. Orion serves approximately 2,500 RIA firms and broker-dealers. Addepar owns the ultra-high-net-worth and family-office corner, where multi-custodian, multi-asset-class portfolios exceed what conventional software can display. Every one of them depends on the same underlying question: who pays for the connection, and how much?

The counterargument: charging for data could make it better

There is a case for the banks, and it is stronger than the aggregators admit. Free connections were maintained on goodwill and broke constantly — 6,121 repairs in a single year is a measure of fragility, not health. A paid pipe gets maintained, documented, and supported. Akoya's model shows that bank-owned, API-only, tokenized access can work without credential storage at all. And the shift from credential-based scraping to OAuth tokens — driven partly by custodians killing credential-based connections — is a genuine security improvement, whatever its cost. The advisors who complain loudest about data fees are often the ones whose clients' logins were sitting in a third party's vault.

Even so, the economics have flipped, and the flip favors scale. A large platform can absorb per-connection fees across thousands of advisors. A small RIA cannot, and the cost will arrive disguised as a platform price increase or a feature that quietly disappears. The $84 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer means the data layer's importance only grows from here — every heir, every new account, every held-away asset is another connection to maintain and another fee to negotiate.

What this means for wealth firms

Audit your connections by type, not by vendor. Direct custodian feeds are the gold standard for accuracy; API and OAuth connections are the modern middle; credential-based scraping is the legacy mechanism being actively squeezed out by large institutions. Ask your platform what it pays for data access and how that cost is passed through — the answer will tell you whether your provider owns its pipes or rents them. And watch the CFPB's 1033 rewrite: if banks may permanently charge for data access, the data layer becomes a metered utility, and the firms that win will be the ones that built direct feeds while they were still cheap. The plumbing was never free. The bill was just deferred.

The definitive source for wealth data intelligence is still up for grabs. WealthDataLayer.com is available for acquisition by the company that will own this category — inquiries to info@primedomaincapital.com.

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