As a former Plaid employee with options that vested after I was shitcanned last year, this is some pretty welcome news.
I'm interviewing with them this week. Any advice/warnings I should know going in?
Visa Buys Plaid
101–110 of 333 posts
Re: Visa Buys Plaid
#102Plaid 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'…
The way Plaid works, I'm surprised that they hadn't already been shut down for breaking banks' TOS. It exposes the banks to so much liability for a product that's not even theirs.
Re: Visa Buys Plaid
#103So, 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?
I must say I was quite surprised when I read this comment. In Germany we have FinTS [1] with an open specification and I'm not aware of a single bank that doesn't support it. It's been around since 2002 [2] and is based on HBCI, which became available in 1998 [3]. I suspected it might be different elsewhere, but I had no idea that the situation was so dire that you had to actively go looking for a bank with an API. […
FinTS does not solve the problem of (scoped) authentication and authorization at all.
It merely provides a standardized interface to access account data or initiate transactions, but it still uses a plain username/password login to authenticate.
Even that it does not do particularly well – the protocol is horrendously outdated and does not support "recent" inventions like credit cards on many popular banks, which means that banking aggregators have to fall back to screenscraping anyway.
However, this will hopefully change soon with PSD2/SCA, which does mandate such secure account access (based on OAuth2, if I understand it correctly).
Re: Visa Buys Plaid
#104Plaid 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 )
That's why VISA paid $4.5B!
Re: Visa Buys Plaid
#105I see a lot of hate for Plaid here. I was my understanding that the only reason you would really ever use Plaid is because they were able give programmatic access to flat-rate fee ACH payments of basically any size. Obviously they were never something you could compare to Stripe. I wonder what's gonna happen with in the near future, especially considering Plaid was obviously stepping on the toes of the interchange-rates of the likes of Visa.
Re: Visa Buys Plaid
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re anon, and I was always curious in terms of $$$ how much did you end up with? At what stage did you join and how many options did you get? Very rare to find real data online about this
I'm happy to post these things, without identifying companies. I'm sure you could find them on my resume or linkedin but there'll still be some ambiguity. Company A, 0.05% or 9000+ options vested, IPO, post-lockout sale at net ~$300k, was an early engineering employee Company B, Make sure you do proper tax planning, taxes take an enormous bite, even with long term capital gains.
What tax-planning resources did you find useful?
Re: Visa Buys Plaid
#107Plaid and the broader explosion of white-label fintech infrastructure is great. Ultimately, it increases the number of companies that can enter the space and provide more competitive loan management tools, decision engines, identity verification, credit, wealth management, and so on to consumers. License the most complex/costly infrastructure, and then progressively swap out those vendor provided capabilities with internal platforms as they scale up (e.g. Revolut).
There's still lots of problems to solve in the connectivity space that Plaid sits in, and the pursuit of some kind of unified open personal finance data standard isn't really on the table for those steering the big initiatives (e.g. FDX). This is mostly due to the variety of the data and number of players (tens of thousands of institutions). For more on that, this interview with Jeff Leathers, founder of Quovo, a similar company that was acquired by Plaid in 2019 is not a bad listen:
https://medium.com/wharton-fintech/podcast-with-lowell-putna...
Re: Visa Buys Plaid
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
closed network?
You only get discover & Amex cards from those companies whereas Visa & MasterCard are networks that other people can “buy into”, ie your bank card (or credit card offered through a bank). IMO not super relevant to topic of competition, there’s 4 networks, the fact that two of them are structured differently doesn’t really have impacts on sellers & customers (other than that the two open networks are significant large…
This isn't quite true, I have a BVAA credit card that uses the AMEX payment network and I used to have an FIA Card Services credit card that used the AMEX payment network (the old Fidelity credit card)
Re: Visa Buys Plaid
#109I see a lot of hate for Plaid here. I was my understanding that the only reason you would really ever use Plaid is because they were able give programmatic access to flat-rate fee ACH payments of basically any size. Obviously they were never something you could compare to Stripe. I wonder what's gonna happen with in the near future, especially considering Plaid was obviously stepping on the toes of the interchange-ra…
Plaid provides an api to access transaction history and verify bank account ownership.
They don't do ACH transfers.
Re: Visa Buys Plaid
#110Plaid 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'…
Not even close to true. We’re one of the larger clients with Plaid and that’s not on Plaid but the service provider to not provide a manual entry.
Plaid works great and we’ve ran into next to no issues with customers linking Plaid