“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.
Ninth Wave connects to bank accounts through Plaid (preferred partner — Ninth Wave routes FI data into Plaid's aggregator network).
Ninth Wave integrates with Intuit QuickBooks (Online & Desktop), Xero, Oracle NetSuite, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Workday Financial Management and Quicken.
The Embedded Finance Index 2026 maps 2 layers in Ninth Wave's stack: Open banking (Plaid (preferred partner — Ninth Wave routes FI data into Plaid's aggregator network)); Accounting (Intuit QuickBooks (Online & Desktop), Xero, Oracle NetSuite, Sage and 3 others).
Ninth Wave was founded by George Anderson and is founded in 2018, headquartered in New York, NY, USA.
Ninth Wave has raised undisclosed in total (latest round: Growth financing from Level Structured Capital).
Get a read on where your own stack stands against Ninth Wave and the rest of its category — what they built versus bought, which providers they use, and where the gaps in your own strategy and competitive set actually are.