benchmarking data vendors and aggregators

Choosing between them is a data engineering and risk decision disguised as a vendor contract.

The core datasets in play

For a lending product, three data categories matter most:

• Transaction-level bank data: account balances, cash flow, recurring payments. Used for cash-flow underwriting and affordability checks.
• Credit bureau data: tradelines, payment history, credit inquiries, public records. Used for traditional credit scoring (FICO in the US, typically 300 to 850; various bureau scores in Europe).
• Identity and fraud signals: device fingerprinting, account age, velocity of applications. Used for fraud and Know Your Customer (KYC) checks.

Each has a different vendor landscape and different benchmark metrics, which is why you cannot score all vendors on one universal scale.

The metrics that actually separate vendors

Coverage

Coverage is the percentage of target institutions or consumers the vendor can actually reachreachThe number of unique people exposed to your message in a given period. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person once, no matter how often they see it.View full definition →. A US aggregator claiming "12,000+ institutions" (a figure vendors like Plaid have cited publicly, treat as approximate and vendor-reported) sounds impressive, but coverage concentration matters more: does it reliably connect to the top 50 banks holding the bulk of deposits, or is the count padded with thousands of tiny, low-traffic credit unions?

Worked example: If your applicant base is 70% customers of the 10 largest US banks, and Vendor A has 98% successful connection rates with those 10 banks but only 60% with smaller banks, while Vendor B has a flatter 85% across the board, Vendor A likely serves your actual population better despite a lower "average" coverage number. Weight coverage by your applicant distribution, not the vendor's total institution count.

Match Rate

Match rate is the percentage of data-pull attempts that successfully return usable data. This differs from "connection success", which just means the login worked. A connection can succeed but return incomplete transaction history (a common issue with banks that limit lookback windows to 90 days).

For credit bureau feeds, the analogous metric is "hit rate": the percentage of applicants for whom the bureau returns a scoreable file. Thin-file or "credit invisible" populations (estimated by the CFPB at around 45 to 60 million US adults as of recent studies, treat as an estimate) will show a lower hit rate, which matters enormously for a lender targeting underserved borrowers.

Latency

Latency is the time from APIAPIApplication Programming Interface: a standardised interface that lets applications communicate and exchange data without knowing each other's internal workings.View full definition → call to usable data return. For real-time lending decisions (point-of-sale financing, instant credit lines), sub-second to few-second latency is often the target; batch underwriting can tolerate minutes. Published benchmarks vary by vendor and are rarely audited independently, so request your own load-test data during a pilot rather than trusting a sales deck.

Data freshness and refresh cadence

How often is the underlying data updated? Some aggregators cache data and refresh only when triggered; others webhook-push updates as transactions post. For cash-flow underwriting, stale data (a balance snapshot from three days ago) can misrepresent true affordability.

A simple vendor scorecard

Here is a minimal framework you can build in a spreadsheet:

(Figures illustrative only, not real vendor benchmarks. Always pilot-test with your own applicant sample.)

Score each column against your product's tolerance thresholds, not against an abstract "best in market" ideal. A buy-now-pay-later product approving in under 5 seconds cares about latency more than a small-business term loan underwritten over 48 hours.

For deeper technical grounding on APIAPIApplication Programming Interface: a standardised interface that lets applications communicate and exchange data without knowing each other's internal workings.View full definition → reliability metrics, the Open Banking Implementation Entity's standards documentation is a solid free reference for UK/EU frameworks.

Governance: the metric behind the metrics

Coverage and latency tell you if a vendor works. Governance tells you if you are legally allowed to keep using it that way.

Key governance checks:

• Data lineageData lineageData lineage maps how data moves and transforms across systems, from origin to consumption, showing where it came from, what changed it, and where it goes.View full definition →: can the vendor show you exactly which bank the data came from and when, for audit purposes? This matters under fair lending laws (Equal Credit Opportunity Act, Regulation B in the US) if you must explain an adverse action.
• Consent scope: does the consumer's authorization match what you are actually pulling? Pulling more data than consented (scope creep) is a compliance breach under GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe and increasingly scrutinized by the CFPB in the US.
• Data retention limits: aggregators and lenders must define how long raw bank data is stored. Under GDPR's data minimization principle, holding data "just in case" is itself a violation risk.
• Vendor concentration risk: if 100% of your underwriting pipelinepipelineAll active sales opportunities across the stages of the sales process, together with their combined potential value and probability of closing.View full definition → depends on one aggregator's uptime, a single outage halts loan originations. This is now a supervisory concern; US bank regulators (OCC, FDIC) have issued guidance treating critical fintech data vendors similarly to other third-party risk under interagency third-party risk management guidance (2023).

A good benchmarking exercise scores governance on the same scorecard as performance, weighted by how much regulatory exposure a failure would create.

🎬 [VIDEO: "How Open Banking APIs Actually Work" - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+open+banking+apis+work - search for current explainer videos from Plaid, Tink, or the Open Banking Implementation Entity demonstrating the consumer consent and data-pull flow end to end]

Putting it together: the decision rule

A workable rule of thumb for the lending PM: weight coverage and match rate for your specific applicant profile at 40%, latency against your product's decision-speed requirement at 25%, governance and lineage at 25%, and cost at 10%. No universal weighting is correct; a fraud-focused product would weight latency and identity-signal coverage far higher.

Always pilot before committing. Run all shortlisted vendors against the same sample of real (consented) applicants for 2 to 4 weeks and measure actual match rate and latency in your environment, not the vendor's marketing benchmark.

Key Takeaways

• Benchmark vendors on coverage, match rate, latency, and freshness, but weight each metric by your applicant population and product speed requirements, not generic vendor claims.
• Coverage counts (like "12,000+ institutions") are vanity metrics unless weighted by where your actual customers bank.
• Governance metrics (consent scope, data lineagedata lineageData lineage maps how data moves and transforms across systems, from origin to consumption, showing where it came from, what changed it, and where it goes.View full definition →, retention limits) are not optional add-ons; they determine regulatory exposure under GDPR, PSD2, and CFPB rules.
• Vendor concentration is a risk metric in itself: single-vendor dependency for a critical data pipelinedata pipelineETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is a data integration process that pulls data from sources, reshapes it into a consistent format, and writes it into a target system.View full definition → is now a supervisory focus area for bank regulators.
• Never trust a vendor's self-reported benchmark for a production decision; pilot with your own consented applicant sample before integrating.