Data aggregation sounds technical until you realise it's the foundation of almost every personal finance app you've ever used. Yodlee was founded in 1999 — ancient by fintech standards — and built some of the earliest technology for connecting financial accounts across institutions, scraping transaction data, and making it available to third-party applications. It was doing open banking before open banking was a regulatory concept. The company powers the financial data infrastructure behind hundreds of apps and financial institutions, enabling account aggregation, transaction categorisation, and cash flow analytics at scale. Acquired by Envestnet in 2015, it now operates as Envestnet Yodlee, sitting at the centre of a broader financial wellness platform. In the context of European open banking — where PSD2 created a regulatory framework for exactly the kind of data access Yodlee pioneered commercially — the company's history is a useful reminder that the best ideas in fintech often predate the regulation that eventually makes them mainstream. Yodlee spent fifteen years building what European regulators eventually mandated.