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Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

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Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#61

Post by pbalau »

travisoneill1 wrote: post #34
nobody9999 wrote: post #20

I was struck by this bit: 'If Plaid remained free to develop its competing payment platform, then “Visa may be forced to accept lower margins or not have a competitive offering."' My understanding is that Plaid would/could charge significantly less (up to 50% less) than Visa currently does. And that's the value of competition . Not necessarily as a race to the bottom (as we've seen in the airline industry, but that's…

Isn't a race to the bottom the best possible thing that could happen to transaction fees?

No, because then you end up with someone like Amazon underpricing everyone out.

Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#62

Post by redisman »

ori_b wrote: post #26
warent wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to hear more about the airline race to the bottom you're talking about. I've been flying once or twice a year for the last 7 years or so, and it's all pretty much been the same except perhaps a lot more addons and bagging fees. Were airlines very different in the past?

> Were airlines very different in the past? Yes, they were much more expensive, but used to provide more for free. There was a time they even had legroom. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...

Right. If you give me $100 I’ll give you this free chocolate bar

Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#63

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

dayjah wrote: post #47
semerda wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where they aren’t using APIs and instead the scrapers, does that mean they have your banking login credentials? Be curious to hear how they get around MFA.

My experience using plaid with Schwab, on which I have MFA, is that you need to add an MFA code to your password when connecting the two. It works for some duration (a few days?) and then loses sync and you have to re-enter the password+MFA combo.

Do you literally concatenate the two? I've been wondering how to get plaid to work with my accounts that have MFA.

Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#64

Post by aliyfarah »

zelly wrote: post #49

Plaid is more of a monopoly than Visa is. Plaid is literally the only way to do ACH without microdeposit verification. There is no reason Plaid should have a monopoly on this. If banks opened up APIs for bank account verification, then anyone could compete with Plaid. As usual the Justice Department doesn't know what they're talking about.

This is a really bad take. Plaid is a 'monopoly' just as much as Stripe is. There is nothing stopping a company from doing the hard work of integrating thousands of banks using a single API. Furthermore, the fees Plaid charges are literally pennies, companies like Transferwise use them to do most of the bank transfers and yet still manage to offer the lowest rates for cross border payments.

One final point: the future relevance of 'bank integration as an API' companies, such as plaid, is really murky. With the advent of Open Banking regulations, real time national payment systems etc the difficulty of integrating various banks using a single API will be drastically reduced.

Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#65

Post by aliyfarah »

cactus2093 wrote: post #10
haltingproblem wrote: post #2

"Plaid has become the leading financial data aggregation company in the United States. Plaid is planning to leverage its connections to build a bank-linked payments network that would compete with Visa. Plaid’s money movement platform would allow consumers to pay merchants directly from their bank accounts using bank credentials rather than a debit card. Plaid’s established connections and technology uniquely positio…

It is quite a fascinating scenario. Apple and Google wallet are integrated into the credit card processing infrastructure. So they don't compete with Visa, their payments still go over Visa's rails. Plaid's killer feature has always been their private access to APIs that the banks won't give to anyone else. It's essentially like they're using modern web APIs while everyone else is using snail mail (i.e. ACH, bank tra…

>Plaid's killer feature has always been their private access to APIs that the banks won't give to anyone else.

These private apis will soon no longer be private due to Open Banking/PSD2 (europe) regulations. Plaid's biggest competitive advantage was removing the complexity of various data formats and APIs of banks. This variance will soon be gone in the coming years.

Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#66

Post by throwaheyy »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #53
vageli wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Paypal has my banking details and can use those or credit/debit card to complete my payments. They always prefer to use bank because of no fees with cc/debit as backup. Google could do the same. ACH is really creaky and old. > We need something like UPI (india) or Wechat (china) in the US. Zelle is a poor substitute. Why is zelle a poor substitute? I can pay people via phone number.

Zelle still uses ACH under the covers.

Zelle is real-time, while ACH is not.

Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#67

Post by jkaplowitz »

zelly wrote: post #49

Plaid is more of a monopoly than Visa is. Plaid is literally the only way to do ACH without microdeposit verification. There is no reason Plaid should have a monopoly on this. If banks opened up APIs for bank account verification, then anyone could compete with Plaid. As usual the Justice Department doesn't know what they're talking about.

> Plaid is literally the only way to do ACH without microdeposit verification.

The only way to do that in what context? When I had a very tiny freelance IT consulting side business in 2011 (and maybe some of 2010), TD Bank was happy to sell me ACH origination access as part of my business account.

Yeah they charged me $10 per batch, so not great for a micro use case, but more tolerable when there are a bunch of higher-price-tag transactions per batch. They didn't require me to do any verification of the other account - they couldn't since the other account didn't have to be mine. I just had to agree to follow NACHA rules and I could put in any account number and routing number I wanted. It's amazing how much access a random individual is easily granted to pull and push money... (Obviously I didn't abuse it, and the blowback following a complaint would have been severe if I had.)

Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#68

Post by Ericson2314 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #45
Ericson2314 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Override the caselaw to take "consumer welfare" off its special pedestal. The higher order effects are much more important, I would also allow sufficiently-employee-owned companies to be exempt in certain respects, to keep the co-op path to socialism open :).

>Override the caselaw to take "consumer welfare" off its special pedestal. The higher order effects are much more important, What might those "higher order effects" be? I'm not being snarky here, I'm just not clear what it is that you're arguing for that makes "consumer welfare" unimportant. It's a provocative position, but you haven't given enough information to evaluate it. Any help you could provide would be great…

The first part of what I said is actually an oft-repeated opinion you are giving me way to much credit for.

A quick google gave me https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl..., which from the little I read does a great job of explaining what's going on.

Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#69

Post by adrr »

zelly wrote: post #49

Plaid is more of a monopoly than Visa is. Plaid is literally the only way to do ACH without microdeposit verification. There is no reason Plaid should have a monopoly on this. If banks opened up APIs for bank account verification, then anyone could compete with Plaid. As usual the Justice Department doesn't know what they're talking about.

Plaid has competitors in the verification space like Yodlee. Plaid doesn’t even scrape the sites, they utilize partners to do it.

Re: Justice Department Sues to Block Visa's Proposed Acquisition of Plaid

#70

Post by kyrra »

zelly wrote: post #49

Plaid is more of a monopoly than Visa is. Plaid is literally the only way to do ACH without microdeposit verification. There is no reason Plaid should have a monopoly on this. If banks opened up APIs for bank account verification, then anyone could compete with Plaid. As usual the Justice Department doesn't know what they're talking about.

> Plaid is literally the only way to do ACH without microdeposit verification

Yodlee? https://www.yodlee.com/account-verification

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