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Visa Buys Plaid

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Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#191

Post by hakfoo »

et2o wrote: post #155
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Visa is extremely unlikely to be disrupted. Their Network links almost every bank in the world. It would take decades for a competitor to sign up all the random banks out there. Furthermore the intermediate steps are not really that lucrative. It'd take tremendous up front cost and patience. Apple couldn't even do it with their in-house credit card.

I'd argue that their weakness is governments more than companies.

Governments are eventually going to see "a foreign company owning our major payment networks" as a national security and sovereignity risk, especially if we end up in a multi-major-power world. They'll also eventually covet the data and the ability to disable "inconvenient" business. You might see it take the form of a government-mandated account (would Visa/Mastercard have taken off at the same angle if universal, instant direct debits were available in the US?), or just providing a glidepath for local commercial alternatives. Look at what Russia is doing with the Mir card.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#192

Post by semerda »

Congrats to Plaid!

Overall, I'm no fan to these scrapers. Apart from the army of engineers (internal cost) required to maintain them, on the outside they sell a promise that is putting user's privacy at risk. This is especially prevalent in the bookkeeping space.

Many "me too apps" stitch their services using Plaid to provide bookkeepers with bank feeds & statements for their clients.

Other's use Xero's HubDoc (which Xero paid 70m for few years back) which basically does the same thing; scraping financial statements from many online services using a combination of tools and humans. It's a goldmine for hackers; plain text logins are stored in their database to practically many online accounts owned by business owners.

Amazing to what degree people will go to to save few hours of labor each month.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#193

Post by ianhawes »

nikolay wrote: post #48

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'…

Both Bank of America and Wells Fargo do technically have APIs, though they're limited in scope to corporate accounts for treasury purposes. I've applied for access to both and both declined to even a sandbox account.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#194

Post by zrail »

rblatz wrote: post #132
jsh123 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can’t contribute in-kind to an IRA.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#195

Post by keithwhor »

pilingual wrote: post #147

Visa's presentation on the acquisition: https://www.scribd.com/document/442819888/Visa-Inc-to-Acquir...

That's interesting... 200M accounts on Plaid.

You gotta figure that's near the top of the S-Curve, right? Very close to 100% of the TAM in the US, and I would imagine that global expansion is costly given banking regulations in different regions. Visa already has the reputation / relationships to push forward there.

Congrats to the team!

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#196

Post by milofeynman »

xml4eva wrote: post #111
brianpgordon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interviewing with them this week. Any advice/warnings I should know going in?

Brush up on k-means clustering. Also be prepared to drink the kool aid.

I heard a mobile engineer interviewed there and the question was go to wikipedia, implement ^ WITH tests in 1 hour. Lordy, they weren't bashing them because they didn't get an offer were they?

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#197

Post by kbaker »

iask wrote: post #168
hitekker wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to thread in question?

If you’re referring to the github link, they took it down after several Complaints. https://github.com/plaid/link/issues/68

Reminder... donate to the Internet Archive!

https://web.archive.org/web/20190510080449/https://github.co...

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#198

Post by diogenescynic »

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…

Visa measures its downtime in seconds per decade. Whatever they’re doing seems to be sustainable and scalable. They work so well, people just take them for granted. ‘It just works’ is a pretty good business model.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#199

Post by bloodm »

ianhawes wrote: post #193
nikolay wrote: post #48

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'…

Both Bank of America and Wells Fargo do technically have APIs, though they're limited in scope to corporate accounts for treasury purposes. I've applied for access to both and both declined to even a sandbox account.

Think what you want about the EU, but sometimes they have good initiatives.

https://www.eu-startups.com/2019/09/open-banking-and-what-it...

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#200

Post by awinder »

astura wrote: post #108
awinder wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

You’re right, it’s weird, American Express has literature where they talk about being a closed loop network and apply that definition. Maybe it’s more appropriate to just say that visa and MasterCard don’t directly offer credit cards.
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