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Visa Buys Plaid

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Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#131

Post by Mathnerd314 »

gimmeThaBeet wrote: post #34
tempsy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No offense to Visa, but I don't think of them as the most innovative organization Visa is a $434B company. I guess "innovative" is subjective but their valuation trajectory has looked like a high growth tech co over the past 5 years.

That's kind of a weird thing, like my mental picture of Visa is indeed that they're a bit stodgy and behind the times. But then the other part of me says that I clearly have no clue what I'm talking about, there's basically no chance they could stay relevant this long without being on top of it at some meaningful level. And potential quasi monopoly status doesn't quite capture it. So much of finance has been disrupte…

All the POS tech is behind the times, because retailers don't want to spend the money to upgrade. But behind the scenes I'm sure their fraud detection etc. is quite reasonable.

It seems their main software division is in India and in the US it's mostly sales, servers, mobile, and POS support, suggesting that the company is focused on the bottom line and probably could be disrupted. For example Bitcoin is getting more and more prevalent. But it's going to take a while before supporting a new payment network is as easy as an over-the-air software update. And the recent trend in "disruption" is acquihires as seen here.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#132

Post by rblatz »

jsh123 wrote: post #116
jaggederest wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do you mean by tax planning? If your company IPOs they will withhold shares for you. Only thing to watch for is depending on your income they might underwithold. There isn’t much more to it than that.

I was taxed at the time of my grant, and then again on the gain when I sell. Had I put them in a self directed IRA i could have bypassed 6 figures of cap gains tax.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#133

Post by tehlike »

smeyer wrote: post #88
curiousDog wrote: post #85

Curious what happens to options that are yet to vest when a company gets acquired like this? I had a potential offer from them and I'll be losing some sleep tonight :(

There's some flexibility, but often the unvested options in the acquired company are converted into unvested options in the acquiring company on the same schedule.

They are talking about potential offer. There is no agreement between the two sides.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#134

Post by alecbenzer »

harryh wrote: post #117
alecbenzer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having 400 employees doesn't say much about how equity is distributed, though. E.g., (made up numbers, I know nothing about Plaid's comp specifically) if an employee gets 1 basis point over 4 years, that's 0.01% * $5.3 billion / 4 = $132,500, which combined with a startup salary might land you at around Google L4.

Unless plaid's equity structure was very unusual, early employees (at least in engineering) certainly received much much more than 1 basis point.

Sure, but what's early? I don't think it's unheard of to get to O(1 basis point) at 100s of employees.

I've seen an offer at a ~50 person company for 1-2 basis points.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#135

Post by [deleted] »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #49
coachtrotz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#136

Post by exclusiv »

tempsy wrote: post #51
erikig wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, if anything banks have been catching on to Plaid and many have decided to stop supporting it e.g. Capital One has been on/off it for years. Banks aren't exactly happy that their API is basically scraping their website, for very valid reasons, including the customer's own security. If enough of the big banks decided they had enough of Plaid then it would present a massive existential threat to the business. If any…

Capital One removed common banking functions on my account about a year or so ago. I can no longer bill pay vendors and exported statements don't even match the UI. So I wouldn't use them as a model. Their online Spark account is terrible.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#137

Post by rblatz »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #49
coachtrotz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Automatic verification of funds, of employment, of income. Plus you can have plaid automatically setup a stripe account in stripe connect, you’d be shocked at how many people screw up their bank account information when filling out a form.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#138

Post by thamer »

dude3 wrote: post #115
thamer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Wells Fargo account uses 2FA, and recently (November 2019) I was unable to connect a service to it through Plaid, getting an error that said my account type was not supported – or something along those lines. They may have fixed it by now, I haven't tried more recently.

You can remove 2FA, login with Plaid, and re add it. This worked for me.

I'm already uneasy with the way Plaid works, I'm not also going to disable 2FA on my account to accommodate the broken way they access accounts (pretending to be a browser instead of using APIs). There are good, secure ways to grant access to resources, and giving your password to Plaid for them to log in to your account with reduced security is definitely not one of them and certainly not an attractive proposition.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#140

Post by dmoy »

exclusiv wrote: post #129
jaggederest wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm recently found out that California treats capital gains as normal income. No fun.

There are fewer than 10 states that don't tax capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income.

Most states tax capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income.

And then 10 states don't tax income at all.

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