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Visa Buys Plaid

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281–290 of 333 posts

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#281
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would say this is an example where a duopoly is useful for consumers. The duopoly allows consumers the ability to use a credit card pretty much anywhere they want in the US; This is pretty convenient if you use a credit card responsively. It is also a better solution than the old days where you would have store cards or a store account. (I am not saying the duopoly is great because these companies are a massive hea…

>I would say this is an example where a duopoly is useful for consumers. The duopoly allows consumers the ability to use a credit card pretty much anywhere they want in the US

Going by that reasoning a monopoly would be even better, as the card would be accepted everywhere.

The consumer pays by lack of innovation and high scheme fees.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#282

Plaid's product is absolutely absurd. Yes, please train your users to type their username and passwords into third party sites because they're given a legitimate looking sign-in box. US Banking infrastructure is so hopelessly bad that this is hack of a business is considered legitimate fin-tech. My wallet was stolen and before I realized it was gone and could cancel my CCs some dude made like six obviously fraudulent…

I have a wallet attached to the back of my phone and it's the only thing I carry. Makes it tough to forget / not realize it missing since I need it so frequently.

Also would make cancelling your cards harder if they were lost along with your phone?

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#283

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.

I'm curious, why shouldn't they?

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#284
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'…

I work for a popular european competitor of Plaid, Tink ( https://tink.com ). We don't do screen scraping, but use the banks' own APIs. These days we also ride on the european bank directive "PSD2" which gives us the right to aggregate financial data from financial providers such as banks. That means we aren't breaking an Terms of Services with banks! ...and yes, we support 2FA. ;)

Very cool! Maybe you could enlighten me as to why it seems that no one support Transferwise? They have an API but all this services snub them

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a wallet attached to the back of my phone and it's the only thing I carry. Makes it tough to forget / not realize it missing since I need it so frequently.

Also would make cancelling your cards harder if they were lost along with your phone?

I don't call banks, it's a terrible experience. I always use online chat or Twitter for that sort of thing.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#286
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'…

Plaid's better than using Finicity, which is even worse.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#287
post #82

Earlier 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…

There are starting to be a lot of Amex network cards are offered through other banks, with everything from Wells Fargo to Credit One (the first is one of the largest in the country, and the second is a basically a scam).

Discover also does this, although there are less available. Here is an example through Comenity in partnership with True Value: https://d.comenity.net/truevaluediscover/pub/Home.xhtml They used to do something similar for a card with Wal-Mart.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#289
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This is a sham. You need to go through lots of audits & other administrative BS in order to be declared an "AISP" even if you don't actually process banking data yourself and it never leaves the user's device. Imagine PCI-DSS compliance but without the exception that you don't have to be PCI-compliant yourself if you don't touch card data and pass it directly to a PCI-compliant payment processor.

Why is it a sham? TPPs (who are either AISPs and/or PISPs) process banking information for customers of participating banks. A TPP will typically provide some kind of service like a unified view of customer finances, and as part of that they're processing customer banking info.

It would be an unusual TPP where the data never left the customer's device. Usually there'll be a web service/web app provided by the TPP and the communications will be between the customer and the TPP and then the TPP and the bank (a.k.a ASPSP)

Whilst it's not perfect, it's a hell of a lot better, from a security perspective, than 3rd parties getting full banking creds for customers.

Re: Visa Buys Plaid

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a popular european competitor of Plaid, Tink ( https://tink.com ). We don't do screen scraping, but use the banks' own APIs. These days we also ride on the european bank directive "PSD2" which gives us the right to aggregate financial data from financial providers such as banks. That means we aren't breaking an Terms of Services with banks! ...and yes, we support 2FA. ;)

does Plaid actually "screen scrape" though? I thought they did the same thing (use the banks API's)

Apparently they don't seem to do it with all their integrations at least: https://www.insider.com/jpmorgan-announces-partnership-with-...
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