By Sachin Mohan · AIM Media House
In March 2026, Perplexity CTO Denis Yarats stood at the Ask 2026 developer conference and made an announcement . Perplexity, which had shipped its own MCP server just months earlier, was moving away from the Model Context Protocol.
The reason was that MCP tool schemas were consuming up to 72% of the company's available context window space before the agent processed a single word of user input, according to the company.
The authentication model, which requires each MCP server to manage its own credentials, added friction at every connection point. For a consumer AI product competing on speed and responsiveness, the overhead was indefensible.
Within days, Y Combinator president Garry Tan offered a blunter verdict , describing MCP as something that "sucks honestly," and published an alternative CLI-based workflow.
A protocol that had seemed unstoppable with 97 million monthly SDK downloads, adopted by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and AWS, donated to the Linux Foundation in December 2025, was suddenly a subject of serious criticism from some of the most credible voices in AI development.
At the same time, in a less visible corner of the same technology landscape, a pattern of adoption had been building in financial services for months. Grasshopper Bank launched what was described as the first MCP server by a US financial institution in August 2025. Bud Financial followed in October.
GoCardless launched in February 2026. Nymbus and Meow Technologies both launched in April.
Every one of them chose MCP deliberately, for reasons that have nothing to do with context window efficiency What MCP Actually Is Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol in November 2024 as an open standard defining how AI agents connect to external tools, data sources, and business systems.
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