Your Financial Stack, Exposed via MCP: The Open Infrastructure Play

Anthropic open-sourced the Model Context Protocol in late 2024, and within months Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI adopted it. For the first time, there's a universal standard for how AI tools access business data. Fintech has spent fifteen years building proprietary silos. That era just got an expiration date.

I spent five years building integrations at Qonto, connectors that moved data between banks, accounting tools, CRMs, and invoicing platforms. I built hundreds of them. Every single one was a custom, bilateral agreement between two systems that had no interest in making your life easier. Each connector was a negotiation. Each API was a moat. The business owner sat in the middle, hostage to a stack of tools that couldn't talk to each other without someone writing bespoke middleware.

This is the state of fintech infrastructure in 2026. Your financial data, the most important signal about the health of your business, is trapped behind walled gardens that extract rent from access.

I'm done with it.

What Open Standards Actually Do

Here's a history lesson that fintech seems determined to ignore.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first email between two machines. The protocol he used, what would become SMTP, was simple, open, and free. Anyone could implement it. No licensing fee. No partnership agreement. No "API key" from a gatekeeper.

CompuServe had email too. So did AOL. Theirs was better in almost every way: richer formatting, built-in directories, integrated with their ecosystems. But their email only worked inside their walls. You could message other CompuServe users. That was it.

SMTP won. Not because it was better. Because it was open.

The same thing happened with HTTP. Tim Berners-Lee could have patented it. CERN could have licensed it. They gave it away instead. Every proprietary alternative, Gopher, WAIS, CompuServe's content platform, had more features and better UX on day one. HTTP won because any server could talk to any client, and nobody needed permission to build.

Open standards don't win because they're technically superior. They win because they turn a zero-sum negotiation into a positive-sum ecosystem. When the protocol is open, builders build on top of it instead of around it. The value accrues to the network, not the gatekeeper.

Fintech has been ignoring this lesson for fifteen years. Every platform builds its own API, its own data model, its own authentication scheme. Connecting two financial tools requires reading two different sets of documentation, handling two different error formats, and maintaining two different integrations that will break independently and without warning.

The result: a business owner with six financial tools has, in theory, access to a complete picture of their business. In practice, they have six partial pictures that don't align, denominated in different schemas, updated at different intervals, accessible through different interfaces. The "integration" between them is the business owner's own brain.

MCP Changes the Equation

The Model Context Protocol is SMTP for business data.

That sentence is doing a lot of work, so let me unpack it. MCP is an open standard, published by Anthropic, adopted by the broader AI ecosystem, that defines how AI tools access external data sources. It's a protocol, not a product. Any AI tool that speaks MCP can connect to any data source that serves MCP. No bilateral agreements. No bespoke connectors. No gatekeepers.

What this means in practice: your financial data becomes a service that any AI tool can query. Not locked inside one vendor's dashboard. Not accessible only through a proprietary API that the vendor controls. Exposed as structured context that any MCP-compatible client can read, reason about, and act on.

This is the shift. Your financial stack goes from being a collection of silos you log into, to an open surface that intelligent tools can interact with. On your behalf, with your permission, through a standard protocol.

At Well, we made a specific architectural decision early on: we would serve your business data as an MCP server. Not as an afterthought. Not as a "developer feature" buried in settings. As the primary interface.

We have 120+ connectors that consume data in, from your bank, your accounting software, your invoicing platform, your CRM, your payroll provider, your expense management tool. All that data flows into Well, gets normalized, reconciled, and unified into a coherent financial picture of your business.

Then we expose that unified picture out, via MCP. Any AI tool that supports the protocol can query it. Claude can ask about your cash position. A custom GPT can pull your outstanding invoices. A developer building an internal tool can access your P&L without writing a single integration. Your data becomes infrastructure that other tools can build on.

This is not a minor product decision. It's a bet on how the market works.

The Bet

Most fintech companies treat data access as a competitive moat. The logic goes: if our customers can easily move their data to another tool, they'll leave. So we make extraction hard. We offer limited CSV exports. We build proprietary APIs that only work with our approved partners. We create ecosystems where leaving means losing context.

This logic is a trap.

It's a trap because it assumes the value you provide is in holding the data. If the only reason customers stay is because leaving is painful, you don't have a product. You have a hostage situation. And hostage situations resolve eventually, always in favor of the hostage.

The open infrastructure bet is the opposite: make your data maximally accessible, and compete on what you do with it. If a customer can trivially move their financial data anywhere, the product that earns their attention is the one that delivers the most intelligence, the most insight, the most value from that data. Not the one that locks the door.

This is uncomfortable for incumbents. It should be. The entire business model of traditional fintech aggregation depends on proprietary data access. Open that up, and the moat evaporates. What remains is the quality of the intelligence layer, and that's where the real competition should be.

Developer-First Distribution

There's a second-order effect of building on open standards that most fintech companies miss entirely: developers become your distribution channel.

When your data is accessible via MCP, every developer building AI tools is a potential integration partner. They don't need a partnership agreement. They don't need your sales team's phone number. They need your MCP endpoint and your documentation. That's it.

This is how HTTP built the web. Nobody asked Tim Berners-Lee for permission to build a website. The protocol was open, the tools were available, and millions of people built things nobody anticipated. The web wasn't planned. It emerged from an open protocol that removed the friction of participation.

We're building for the same dynamic. Today, Well has 120+ connectors. Our roadmap targets 500+. But the connectors that consume data in are only half the story. The MCP endpoint that serves data out is what turns Well from a product into a platform. Every AI tool that connects to our MCP server extends the surface area of what a business can do with their financial data, without us building anything.

A developer in São Paulo can build a Portuguese-language financial advisor that queries Well's MCP endpoint. A team in Berlin can build an industry-specific analytics tool for restaurants that pulls live financial data. A solo founder can build a Slack bot that answers "how much did we spend on AWS last month?" by querying the same endpoint. None of these require our involvement. None of them require a partnership. The protocol handles it.

This is the 500+ connector vision stated differently: we don't need to build 500 connectors ourselves if the protocol enables 5,000 developers to build on top of us.

What This Means for Your Business

Strip away the protocol talk, and here's what this looks like for a business owner:

You connect your existing financial tools to Well. Your bank, your invoicing software, your accounting platform, whatever you use. Well unifies that data into a single, coherent picture.

Then you, or any AI tool you choose, can ask questions. Not through a dashboard. Not through a report builder. Through a conversation, or through code, or through any application that speaks MCP. The data is yours. The access is open. The intelligence is competitive.

Your accountant can connect their AI tools to your Well endpoint and pull what they need without you exporting anything. Your financial advisor can query your data in real-time instead of working from last quarter's spreadsheet. Your own custom tools can tap into live financial data without you building or maintaining a single integration.

This is what "exposed via MCP" means in practice. Your financial stack stops being a locked room you visit. It becomes an open surface that works for you, through any tool, any interface, any developer that wants to build something useful.

The Infrastructure Play

The companies that win in the long run are the ones that become infrastructure. Not the ones that build the best features. Not the ones that have the slickest UI. The ones that become the layer everything else depends on.

Email servers are infrastructure. HTTP servers are infrastructure. DNS is infrastructure. They won because they were open, because they were reliable, and because the cost of switching away was higher than the cost of staying. Not because of lock-in, but because of value.

Well is making the same bet: become the open infrastructure layer for business financial data. Make the protocol standard. Make the access frictionless. Make the data so accessible that locking it up again would feel like going back to CompuServe after you've had the web.

Data lock-in is a liability, not an asset. The companies that understand this will build the next generation of financial infrastructure. The ones that don't will join CompuServe in the history books.

We're building the open layer. The protocol is ready. The connectors are live. Your financial stack is ready to be exposed.

Well, it's about time.