Stripe Financial Connections

Plaid gets its market validated!

Question: are US banking really this dysfunctional? Where I'm from, a bank consortium already provided unified login services (while banks still have their own websites, as a merchant you only need to integrate the consortium-provided APIs rather than using Plaid) simplifying things.

Yes. Some banks still run COBOL behind the scenes here.

From https://stripe.com/docs/financial-connections/fundamentals#h...

> With the authentication flow, your user logs into their bank either through an OAuth (bank-hosted) or non-OAuth flow to authenticate access to their accounts.

> Stripe generally defaults the authentication flow to OAuth if available at the financial institution. Your integration doesn’t need to treat OAuth accounts differently than non-OAuth accounts.

If Stripe can leverage their banking relationships to leapfrog Plaid by integrating directly with bank's APIs instead of doing screen scraping... that would be massive! It seems like Plaid's biggest weakness is the flakiness of their connections, which creates so much frustration/churn downstream.

Plaid's other weakness is their opaque, enterprise-style pricing, which is seems like Stripe is doing away with. Hopefully they can bring the price down, because lots of consumer-facing use cases aren't viable due to the high monthly price per connection.

I hope they add support for investment account holdings—it seems like Plaid is the only one that does this well.

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Edit: digging deeper, it looks like Stripe proxies to Plaid-like "service providers" under the covers—at least for institutions without OAuth flows. [1][2][3] Presumably they'll build in-house connections over time, but it dents my hope that their connectivity will be better than Plaid's. Either way, transparent pricing and more competition in the space is still welcome!

[1]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-is-the-relationshi...

[2]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-does-stripe-limit-d...

[3]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/who-will-obtain-my-fina...