Bank connections
The bank connections you forgot you made.
Over a few years most people link their bank to more apps than they can name — a budgeting app, a tax tool, a lender that wanted to “verify income,” a rent-reporting service, a trial you abandoned in a week. Those links usually keep working long after you stop using the app. Here’s how to find them, close the ones you don’t need, and know what that does and doesn’t accomplish. It costs nothing, and it works whether or not you ever use GlidePath.
Why this is worth doing.
Connections outlive the reason you made them.
You linked an account to get through one signup. The app is gone from your phone, but the connection is a separate thing from the app — and it doesn’t expire just because you lost interest.
You can’t close what you can’t remember.
Almost nobody keeps a list. That’s the whole problem, and it’s also why the first step below is a lookup rather than a decision — you can’t judge a connection until you can see it.
Reversible — but not free of consequences.
You can reconnect later from inside the app. But Plaid is explicit that after you disconnect you may lose features that rely on that data, so a connection doing real work — a scheduled payment, an income verification, a service reporting your rent to the credit bureaus — is worth a second look before you cut it. Start with the ones you don’t recognize.
A shorter list is easier to keep honest.
The goal isn’t zero connections — plenty of them are earning their keep. It’s a list short enough that you could recite it, so next time this is a read-through rather than a search.
The audit
Four places to look, in this order.
The order matters. The first two show you connections you’d never think to search for; the last two are where you finish the job.
1 Start at the connection provider, not the app.
Most apps don’t connect to your bank themselves. They hand the job to a middleman — Plaid is the one you’ve most likely used, and MX, Finicity, Yodlee and Akoya do the same work. Plaid runs a free consumer tool calledPlaid Portal: you create an account, and it lets you see the connections it knows about in one dashboard, disconnect financial accounts from an app, and ask Plaid to delete the data it holds. Start there, because it’s organized aroundyou rather than around one app.
Before you leave Portal, work its own recovery steps. Plaid is explicit that you may see many of your connected apps but not all of them, and it names three things to try: verify your matched connections under theOverview tab, add any missing accounts you linked with Plaid but don’t see listed, and then choose Not seeing everything? from your connections list. Doing that first is what keeps a still-findable connection from being missed entirely —Plaid’s guidance on missing connections has the detail.
Even then, treat it as a strong start rather than a full inventory. Plaid says some connections stay invisible because of how they were made — manual microdeposits, unsupported institutions, products in beta — and Portal covers nothing made through the other providers at all. If a connection won’t come off there, Plaid points you to itsPrivacy Request Form. Steps 2 and 3 are where you look for whatever it didn’t show you.
2 Then your bank’s own controls.
Your bank or card issuer may have its own page listing the third parties with access to your account, and a button to cut each one off. Where it exists it’s usually under security or privacy settings, labeled something like connected apps,data sharing, third-party access, or account authorizations. The wording and the menu path differ by institution and both get reorganized periodically, so search your bank’s help center for “connected apps” rather than trusting a click-path you read somewhere — including this one.
This is the closest thing to a single source of truth, but don’t treat it as a complete one: coverage varies by institution, and some document connections this page can’t remove on its own. If something won’t revoke here, contact the institution directly and ask.
3 Then the apps themselves — and delete the account, not just the link.
This is the step almost everyone skips. Cutting the connection stops newdata from flowing. It does not remove the history the app already collected and still stores. If you’re finished with a service, close the account properly and, where the service offers it, ask for deletion of the data it holds — that’s a separate request from disconnecting, and it’s the one aimed at the data itself rather than at the flow. Expect it to be partial: companies keep what they say they’re required or permitted to keep, and Plaid’s own request form says as much.
4 Write down what survived, and why.
Four lines in a note is enough: the app, the account it touches, and the reason you kept it. It turns next year’s audit into a quick read-through, and it makes an unfamiliar entry obvious the moment it appears.
The limits
What revoking doesn’t do.
Worth saying, because this kind of cleanup gets oversold:
- It doesn’t delete data anyone already has. Revoking is a valve, not an eraser. Whatever was collected before you turned it off is still wherever it was kept — which is exactly why step 3 exists. And a deletion request is a request: some of it lawfully stays.
- It doesn’t undo a breach that already happened. If your information was in something that leaked last year, closing the connection today doesn’t retrieve it, and it doesn’t shrink what that company still holds. Plaid puts it plainly: disconnecting stops future data sharing only, and the app may keep what it already collected. Only a completed deletion reduces the stored pile, and only as far as the company’s retention obligations allow.
- Your bank still holds your data. That doesn’t change and can’t. Revoking doesn’t reduce how many companies hold a copy either — that’s what step 3 is for. What it changes is how many keepreceiving new data from your accounts going forward.
So this is hygiene, not armor. It’s the same reason you close old accounts you don’t use: fewer moving parts, fewer things to keep track of, fewer ways to be surprised.
The obvious follow-up
“Fine — but then how do I see everything in one place?”
That’s the real tradeoff, and it’s a fair one. A live connection is what buys you one screen you didn’t have to assemble. Cut the connections and you’ve got clarity about your data and a mess on your desk.
There is another way to build that screen, and it’s the one GlidePath is built on:the files your institutions already give you. Many banks and brokerages publish downloadable transaction exports — CSV, tab-delimited or Excel (.xlsx) — and monthly statements as PDFs. You download them and GlidePath reads them on your computer, building net worth, cash flow, spending and retirement projections from what you brought in, with no permanent bank-login connection to maintain and your financial data staying in files you can open, copy and back up yourself.
Be clear-eyed about the shape of it. Nineteen export formats are auto-detected; anything else goes through a column mapper you fill in once. Statement reading is calibrated for several major issuers, and other PDFs are captured for you to finish by hand rather than extracted automatically. Some institutions won’t give you a usable download at all, and those accounts you enter yourself. Every import is yours to review before it is saved.
It asks more of you than background sync does. About once a month you go get the files. We’ve tried to make that part small — a downloads folder the app watches, a browser extension that catches exports at a handful of major banks while you’re already signed in, and a guided picker that recommends the best path for your bank. What we won’t do is ask for your bank password — nothing in the app asks for one.
The single screen was always the point. This is the version of it you can open, copy and keep — and it goes on working whichever connections you just closed.