Back to glossary
Banking / Technical

OAuth Aggregation

Also known as: Agregación OAuth, Account Aggregation

Definition

OAuth Aggregation is the method of obtaining banking data via the OAuth protocol, where the user authorizes an external app to read their banking information without sharing credentials.

LATAM context

It's the model behind Belvo, Plaid, Prometeo and Open Finance APIs. Safer than asking for a password, but it requires the bank to support it. Many LATAM banks still don't expose OAuth.

Concrete example

A budgeting fintech asks you to connect your bank. It redirects you to your bank's own portal, you enter your credentials there, authorize read access to your transactions, and the fintech receives your data without ever holding your credentials.

How it shows up on your bank statement

It doesn't show up in the document either. It's the mechanism by which an app gets permission to read the account directly from the bank, instead of starting from a file the user downloaded.

How does finO$ handle this?

finO$ does NOT use OAuth aggregation. It processes PDFs directly. Useful when OAuth isn't available (many LATAM banks) or when persistent authorization isn't something the user wants to grant.

Related terms

Open Finance

Need to convert bank statements into structured data?

Start freeGo to my dashboard See the API reference

Just one file? Use the free converter to convert your bank statement to Excel.

Frequently asked questions about OAuth Aggregation

Does OAuth aggregation ask for my bank username and password?

In a correct implementation, credentials are entered on the bank's own site, not the app's, and the app only receives an access token. In practice, that model coexists with other implementations that do ask for credentials directly, which is known as screen scraping.

Why does an already-authorized OAuth connection sometimes break?

Because the token expires, the bank changes its authentication flow, or a second factor kicks in. That's the maintenance cost of the model: the connection has to be re-validated, while a downloaded PDF never stops working.