Why AI Agents Can't Access Your Bank — and What Might Fix It

Bank APIs exist thanks to PSD2, but accessing them requires expensive eIDAS certificates costing €2,000–€10,000 per year, making them inaccessible to individual developers and AI agents. Aggregators like Plaid and TrueLayer absorb this cost, creating a bottleneck that prevents direct agent-to-bank connections. A proposed solution is a certificate-free read-only tier that would let agents access account data without full regulatory compliance.