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Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

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Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#151

Post by thekyle »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #99
smnrchrds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

> Also, giving your credentials to any third party, including Plaid, voids the warranty at many financial institutions. If your account gets hacked and your money stolen, you may find out that the zero liability policy no longer applies to you. The trouble is, giving someone your account number also makes it not the bank's problem what they do with that number, even if it was clearly unauthorized by you. There's no g…

I don't buy this. If I give someone a check (which has an account number on it) that doesn't mean they get to withdraw whatever they want from my bank account. What bank in the U.S. wont reverse fraudulent ACH debits?

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#152

Post by tadfisher »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #139
smnrchrds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

> takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it So does, for example, Yodlee, when you use them to have an API for bank statements. I cannot say if they too monetize the data that opens up to them for grabs. It took legislation and years of preparation to enforce APIs and interoperability onto European banks (yes, I can now use bank A's app to view my account balance in bank B, while maintaining contro…

I would wager that 90% of the business for Plaid, Yodlee, and Intuit is account verification; the thing that you used to do by having small ACH transfers of random amounts that you verify. The fact is that 90% of running a fintech business is identifying and bounding fraud risk, and these "banking API" companies are able to move the needle down a couple of basis points.

edit It's shit like this that just screams for the Fed to force FIs to implement a standard API for verifying accounts and making transfers. I bet half of fintech would collapse overnight, but the collective cost savings would be in the billions.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#153

Post by exinuit »

bnchrch wrote: post #22

Finicity is already a great alternative to Plaid. I imagine bottles of champagne are popping at Mastercard HQ right now.

Which is crazy because Fincity bought Intuit's Aggregation engine (Customer Account Data - that intuit launched back @ Finovate 2012-ish) - so the block wasn't because of account aggregation and more for Plaid's comments towards making a alternative payment platform that would compete with VISA.

Either way all aggregators use screen-scraping when they can't get a direct connection, because banks are slow and protective of "their" data (which is really YOUR data) it's a constant tug of war.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#154

Post by ProfessorLayton »

babesh wrote: post #71
jdavis703 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The windfall typically isn’t anywhere close to millions of dollars for regular employers. We’re talking about payouts on the level of buying a new car or placing a down payment on a home.

I think you meant regular employees? From my limited experience, the windfall is actually much more than a new car or down payment and can reach into the millions of dollars if the stock rises a couple hundred percent. Most of the unicorn startups that have gone IPO were offering stock options close to or above the million dollar range for senior engineers. Don’t forget the refreshes. The big limiter is actually taxe…

For options, taxes only become a big limiter if one waited for the value to rise substantially from the strike price, thus creating a large spread that will be taxed as income. If shares are purchased as they vest and held for over a year, the gains will be subject to much more favorable long term tax treatment when sold.

Larger companies will typically switch to RSUs, which get taxed like income, and isn't great for a non-liquid asset. Thats what double-trigger RSUs solve, by not having the employee own the shares until a liquidity event, they won't need to pay taxes on them until it happens. The catch is that now the employee needs to hold onto the shares for a year to get a more favorable tax treatment.

Taxes will really only take close to half if employees insist on selling their shares in less than a year.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#155

Post by yowlingcat »

AlexandrB wrote: post #28
jamestimmins wrote: post #5

Whatever you think about Visa or this merger, this would be a major disappoint to Plaid's team members who thought they were in for a huge financial windfall. If that applies to anyone here, my sympathies and best of luck figuring out what's next for Plaid. Hopefully the morale hit isn't too big on the team.

This comment strikes a nerve with me - perhaps because it's "saying the quiet part loud". I thought the typical goal of hackers and startups was to "change the world" and "make a difference". How does selling to Visa accomplish those things? Isn't expressing sympathy with Plaid's staff for not getting a payout effectively saying "sorry that you might actually have to deliver on the lofty promises this time"? It's als…

> I thought the typical goal of hackers and startups was to "change the world" and "make a difference".

That sounds like the goal of a non-profit, not a startup. What a founder says at a TED talk (which I admit can often sound like the former) shouldn't be conflated with the nuts and bolt conversations they have with their closest lieutenants and investors. Assuming we mean venture funded by "startup" the definition has always been growth oriented, highly risky and innovative through disruption.

> It's also kind of indicative of how small startup ambitions have become. Acquisition has become a measure of success, not failure.

Really? I'm surprised you think that acquisition is either a measure of success or failure in a vacuum. Wouldn't the terms and the specific deal be important than how a company exits? After all, there's a world of difference between an acquihire and a strategic merger.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#156

Post by tadfisher »

pg_bot wrote: post #60
madamelic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Plaid must be something special. It's not so much that Plaid is "something special" but that US banks are stuck in the 1950's technologically. Plaid shouldn't exist. It only exists because banks refuse to create open APIs for others to integrate with. With that said, Plaid has done a fantastic job.

This seems to be changing. Nacha (the organization that governs ACH) has been developing open APIs so that more organizations can get access to the ACH network without any dirty hacks. I would expect to see a rise in the number of personal finance applications over the next few years due to this fact. https://www.nacha.org/content/available-apis https://www.nacha.org/content/phixius

The problem is that Nacha is building these APIs on top of ACH. There needs to be a universal realtime payment and account-validation network, not a file FTP'd to the Fed that's sent out three times a day.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#157

Post by iancarroll »

cameldrv wrote: post #100
smnrchrds wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is the pinky promise that they will not do bad things with their access.

They are selling the data to marketing companies to build a dossier on you, and this could be used for any number of purposes once it is in the hands of data brokers. They're tricking people into handing over the information, and then they're using it for purposes that may harm the victim, so like I said, it's hard to draw a line.

I don't think this is true, and Plaid makes pretty explicit claims that they do not do this, i.e.:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655417

- https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#158

Post by Ihaveacomment12 »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #112
smnrchrds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

I am sure I will be called naive, but this is shocking to me. I assumed that Plaid was integrating with the banks and not doing this sort of thing because of the people associated with Plaid. Their seed round included Spark Capital and Google Ventures. Their most recent round included Mary Meeker and Andreessen Horowitz. [1] These investors have reputations to protect. This type of thing would certainly come out in d…

[flagged]

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#159

Post by jjeaff »

f430 wrote: post #136
throwaway9980 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the situation. Another of Plaid's investors is Goldman Sachs. I naively assumed that Plaid's ability to build their product was likely based on access to private APIs available to them based on their relationships and backing. If someone came to me and asked me to build what Plaid has built, I would decline the work. I would assume that impersonating a bank would be illegal. I would assume that the banks…

Back when I used to run a web scraping shop, we had this exact request. I didn't know it was illegal at the time but we ultimately didn't do it because lot of people just want to pay as little as possible for scraping without considering the amount of work that goes behind it.

Web scraping is not illegal per se. Though it may be against the specific terms of service of the site you are scraping.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#160

Post by jjeaff »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #99
smnrchrds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

> Also, giving your credentials to any third party, including Plaid, voids the warranty at many financial institutions. If your account gets hacked and your money stolen, you may find out that the zero liability policy no longer applies to you. The trouble is, giving someone your account number also makes it not the bank's problem what they do with that number, even if it was clearly unauthorized by you. There's no g…

You are guaranteed a minimum of 30 days to contest an ACH charge. 2 days for businesses.
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