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Visa Buys Plaid

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Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#41

Post by mmckelvy »

throwaway13000 wrote: post #4

So, pertinent question. I want to move my account to a bank which gives me an API so I don't have to deal with Plaid or Mint. I.e. I want data privacy. I want to build a personal dashboard of where my money is going. Any suggestions?

What about OCR'ing (or extracting from an electronic PDF) your bank statement each month and then parsing the data into your desired format? You could add tags, metadata, etc. as well.

I'm thinking of something where you download your statement (usually available in PDF form) and then drag it to a web interface where it then gets OCR'd and processed.

A bit more manual, but the upside is you're not leaking your creds and you should also have access to more data (banks have to provide statements and they usual provide them going back many years).

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#42

Post by jyrkesh »

throwaway13000 wrote: post #4

So, pertinent question. I want to move my account to a bank which gives me an API so I don't have to deal with Plaid or Mint. I.e. I want data privacy. I want to build a personal dashboard of where my money is going. Any suggestions?

Check out Mintable: https://github.com/kevinschaich/mintable

It uses Plaid out-of-the-box, but it has a pluggable provider model for other data sources: https://github.com/kevinschaich/mintable/blob/master/docs/PR...

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#43

Post by amluto »

tempsy wrote: post #12

Have to say I'm not a fan of Plaid at all. Dark patterns galore. Absolutely no indication when you go through a Plaid flow that you're likely giving away much more than just the bare minimum account numbers to push money in/out of your bank account. Often, you're also giving away transaction data, identity, real-time balance, etc. There's no way to know prior to linking your account. I had high hopes that would have…

I’m personally a bit surprised that banks haven’t embraced U2F / WebAuthn as a way to disable Plaid.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#44

Post by metalliqaz »

tempsy wrote: post #33
sithadmin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a duopoly? In the US, AMEX and Discover aren't that difficult to use, and a fair amount of retailers accept in-house credit accounts and international creditors like JCB and UnionPay. Payment via debit networks is still very common, and low-tech forms of payment such as cash and checks are still acceptable in many use cases.

Amex and Discover are different as those are closed-network. I think it's really hard to argue Visa/MC is not a duopoly. Unfortunately anti-trust enforcement in the US has been more political than anything.

closed network?

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#45

Post by erikig »

amluto wrote: post #43
tempsy wrote: post #12

Have to say I'm not a fan of Plaid at all. Dark patterns galore. Absolutely no indication when you go through a Plaid flow that you're likely giving away much more than just the bare minimum account numbers to push money in/out of your bank account. Often, you're also giving away transaction data, identity, real-time balance, etc. There's no way to know prior to linking your account. I had high hopes that would have…

I’m personally a bit surprised that banks haven’t embraced U2F / WebAuthn as a way to disable Plaid.

On the contrary - Banks are falling over themselves to embrace Plaid, Finicity, Decisionlogic, Yodlee and all their ilk because failure to do so will result in the departure of their customers to a bank that supports all the new fintech apps that rely on these API providers.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#46

Post by sjg007 »

findjashua wrote: post #9
throwaway13000 wrote: post #4

So, pertinent question. I want to move my account to a bank which gives me an API so I don't have to deal with Plaid or Mint. I.e. I want data privacy. I want to build a personal dashboard of where my money is going. Any suggestions?

the only way atm would be to sign up for email notifications for any transactions, and parse the emails to get relevant data there are a few issues though: 1. some banks only send notifications for transactions that are over a certain amount (eg BofA is >$25) 2. the merchant name is arbitrarily cut-off (based on char length), so you don't really get reliable merchant info

You could parse SMS too.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#47

Post by shamir »

eerrt wrote: post #24

Do the early employees get a huge payout on their options?

The early employees will get millions of dollars. This is 1)an unreasonably large amount of money for anybody to make or 2)nothing compared to the billions that the founders and venture investors will make.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#48

Post by nikolay »

Plaid is terrible! Both Wells Fargo and Bank of America support API integration, but Plaid chooses to screen-scrape and does not work if you have 2FA enabled. Also, you can't even manually enter your bank information. In other words, even if you pay dearly to Plaid, you may block many users who use some of the top banks in the States! There is a bunch of services I cannot use because they rely solely on Plaid, and I'm not willing to disable 2FA! Maybe being Visa, it will make the whole service more meaningful if Visa pushes banks to integrate, because it's 2020, and giving your password for your bank to a third party, when there are APIs and OAuth/OpenID protocols available for banks.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#49

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

coachtrotz wrote: post #31
coachtrotz wrote: post #2

Plaid is an incredible company and provides a valuable service to their tech partners. That said, their data collection practices are scary. They allow any developer using their software to swallow all of a users banking data - I would love to know how they police bad actors. (Source: https://plaid.com/legal/#privacy-statement )

Here is pertinent verbiage from the Plaid Privacy Statement. Information we collect from your financial accounts. The information we receive from the financial product and service providers that maintain your financial accounts varies depending on the specific Plaid services developers use to power their applications, as well as the information made available by those providers. But, in general, we collect the follow…

I never used Plaid, but it reads like information used in typical bank application for credit. Why would anyone willingly share this much without get something major in return?

Does Plaid bank the underbanked? I am not sure what their appeal is.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#50

Post by alanmeaney »

mmckelvy wrote: post #41
throwaway13000 wrote: post #4

So, pertinent question. I want to move my account to a bank which gives me an API so I don't have to deal with Plaid or Mint. I.e. I want data privacy. I want to build a personal dashboard of where my money is going. Any suggestions?

What about OCR'ing (or extracting from an electronic PDF) your bank statement each month and then parsing the data into your desired format? You could add tags, metadata, etc. as well. I'm thinking of something where you download your statement (usually available in PDF form) and then drag it to a web interface where it then gets OCR'd and processed. A bit more manual, but the upside is you're not leaking your creds…

Have you tried AutoEntry? Might be the solution you are looking for. https://www.autoentry.com/
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