In this Headless Banking Podcast episode, Jeff talks with Ruben, co-founder and CEO of Quiltt, a unified API for open banking that provides access to multiple account aggregation and enrichment platforms through one integration and contract. Reuben shares his background in financial data (including S&P Capital IQ), how building a consumer budgeting app on Plaid revealed how messy and hard-to-use aggregation data can be, and how COVID and fintech demand led Quilt to pivot into an API-first platform. Quilt partners with providers like MX and MasterCard and normalizes data while preserving raw transparency, aiming for higher connection success via multiple “paths” to institutions—especially for underserved B2B and business banking use cases. They also discuss PDF bank statements for reconciliation and fund accounting, the challenges of licensing and minimums, continued reliance on screen scraping, and careful, compliance-driven use of AI in engineering.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

00:19 Ruben’s Founder Journey

03:55 Budgeting App to API Pivot

06:49 Killing Products and Focus

08:35 AI in Fintech Engineering

14:01 Why Quiltt vs Plaid

16:14 PDF Statements Use Cases

18:47 Coverage and Multi Aggregator Strategy

23:38 B2B Connectivity Gap

29:10 Screen Scraping and Open Banking Reality

32:49 Competition and Partnerships Moat

35:53 Wrap Up and Thanks

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