FF News Tattoo Studio: Dan Feaheny on Customer-First Banking

At the FF News Tattoo Studio at Fintech Talents Festival 2025 Dan Feaheny from Feeney Fintech agreed to a tattoo of the Plaid logo. Feaheny made it clear this wasn’t just brand love, it was about what Plaid represents in the guts of financial services. The Dan Feaheny Open Banking Future vision came with a strong message: APIs—not regulation—unlocked fintech progress.

Dan Feaheny rates Plaid because, in his view, it helped the US “do open banking” without a formal protocol or mandate while pointing to Plaid building from major early use cases like Venmo, and how the market reacted with bank-led alternatives such as Zelle. For Dan Feaheny, the key thing is that this was free and open market momentum rather than something forced by a competition authority. He also mentions Plaid nearly being bought by Visa, and says he’s glad it didn’t happen.

That feeds his bigger point: Plaid is “the fintech’s fintech”, a core API layer lots of fintechs plug into to move money better and safer, and to widen access. Dan Feaheny sees APIs as the practical way to connect data securely, especially with AI coming fast. He argues screen scraping can’t be the answer anymore, and he calls out two habits he thinks need to die off: big tech hoarding data, and big banks hiding behind “security and privacy” while not actually serving customers better.

He also shared where the drive comes from personally and says the 2008–2010 financial crisis hit him hard and it left him wanting to help banks finally modernise. In his eyes, too many banks are still stuck on 1980s infrastructure and a mindset that doesn’t match today’s world.

From there, Dan Feaheny zooms out: money has become data, but value still doesn’t move in real time, and that gap benefits fraudsters and criminals. With AI “like a speeding bullet train”, he doesn’t believe banks can keep hoarding data, tick regulator boxes, and hope it works out.

Dan Feaheny thinks we’re heading toward real-time movement of money and value, and flags stablecoins as a clear signal of what’s coming.

On what makes a “good guy” in financial services, Dan Feaheny says it starts with total focus on the customer and cites early Starling Bank as a model. He also questions whether the old business model of profiting from central bank issuance and lending margins survives in a world of AI, automation, orchestration, and programmable money. If everything gets automated, he says, it raises an important open question: what’s the purpose of a bank?

He also namechecks MX (which he places in Utah) as another company with similar values, a cloud-first, API-native, with “track and trace” so issues can be spotted in real time. For Dan Feaheny, the unglamorous work now is helping banks manage customer data responsibly as finance shifts from accounts to wallets to stablecoins, where consent and visibility matter.

The Dan Feaheny Open Banking Future envisions a world where programmable money, customer-first design, and AI-powered orchestration finally push banks to evolve—or become obsolete.