The second question is more aligned to what we're doing. We currently interface with banks through a scraper. It's inefficient, slow and at risk of breaking when the banks change their interface.
To be clear - we provide this interface with the banks as a service to other companies who want to use the consumer's data inside the bank account (with their consent of course). A good example is a loan affordability calculation. Instead of asking a user to upload a bank statement, we provide the interface with their online banking profile which allows them to extract raw transaction data more quickly. We then send that data to the company is offering the loan so that they can make an affordability decision.
In our country there are other companies who do the RE method. I am not aware there is another way, other than scraping and that because our banks don't offer external API's.
There are other products that have done exactly what I described above. They have instant EFT solutions etc. So I'm almost certain there are developers who can do it locally. But that helps.