Ninth Wave
“Can a bank-side open-finance gateway become the default 1033-compliance stack for US financial institutions before Plaid/MX collapse the market from the fintech side?”
Ninth Wave began life inside Enterprise Engineering, Inc. (EEI), a financial-services consultancy building custom data-connectivity software for large US banks starting in the late 1990s. In 2018 the software product was spun out as a standalone company. Ninth Wave sits on the bank side of the open finance value chain — the anti-Plaid — selling FDX-compliant APIs and direct ERP/accounting integrations to financial institutions so they can share consumer-permissioned data with aggregators and fintechs without screen scraping. The company's near-term strategic bet is that CFPB Section 1033 forces every US FI to buy an open-finance gateway, and its 2024 Plaid partnership plus 2026 Compass AI onboarding tool are positioning it to capture that wave.