Screen scraping in banking is a technique where a third-party application uses the customer's online banking username and password to log in on their behalf, then extracts (scrapes) account data—balances, transactions, account details—from the bank's web interface. It was the primary method used by early data aggregators (e.g. Yodlee, Plaid in earlier years) before dedicated APIs existed.

Screen scraping carries significant risks: the customer shares their banking credentials with a third party, there is no standardised consent mechanism, and it can break when the bank changes its website. Open banking regulations such as PSD2 in the EU and the UK Open Banking Standard were designed to replace screen scraping with secure, API-based access where the customer authorises data sharing directly with their bank without revealing credentials.

Some markets (notably the US) still rely partly on credential-based access alongside emerging API standards like FDX. The Open Banking Tracker tracks which countries and aggregators have moved from screen scraping to API-based access.