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Stripe Financial Connections

stripe.com

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Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#31

Post by zachperret »

kareemsabri wrote: post #27
ianstormtaylor wrote: post #10

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. Hopefull…

Pretty sure Plaid already has integrated directly with bank's APIs and has been moving away from screen scraping for years. Plaid's flakiness / reliance on screen scraping is probably that a lot of these banks don't expose APIs / OAuth etc.

Indeed! Plaid is integrated with ~every bank that has an API, and in many cases we've actually helped the banks build API's themselves.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#33

Post by ianstormtaylor »

zachperret wrote: post #29
ianstormtaylor wrote: post #10

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. Hopefull…

Plaid founder here. Stripe does not integrate with any bank API's directly (AFAICT). They wrap two aggregators, MX and Finicity to build this product. (Also, not sure what MX products they are using, but MX itself is an aggregator of aggregators, including others such as Yodlee.) On pricing, Stripe's listed rates are 30-200% higher than Plaid rates (perhaps due to high vendor costs). That said, if anyone does have fe…

Thanks for the reply! I came to that same conclusion about their use of "service providers" after reading through their support docs (and added an edit above), definitely a bummer.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#34

Post by zachperret »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #33
zachperret wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plaid founder here. Stripe does not integrate with any bank API's directly (AFAICT). They wrap two aggregators, MX and Finicity to build this product. (Also, not sure what MX products they are using, but MX itself is an aggregator of aggregators, including others such as Yodlee.) On pricing, Stripe's listed rates are 30-200% higher than Plaid rates (perhaps due to high vendor costs). That said, if anyone does have fe…

Thanks for the reply! I came to that same conclusion about their use of "service providers" after reading through their support docs (and added an edit above), definitely a bummer.

We all wish more banks had API's! Our team is actively working with many more banks to launch them soon, but alas -- legacy infrastructure is slow to move!

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#35

Post by gonehome »

zachperret wrote: post #31
kareemsabri wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Plaid already has integrated directly with bank's APIs and has been moving away from screen scraping for years. Plaid's flakiness / reliance on screen scraping is probably that a lot of these banks don't expose APIs / OAuth etc.

Indeed! Plaid is integrated with ~every bank that has an API, and in many cases we've actually helped the banks build API's themselves.

Do you know why Fidelity Investments plaid connection doesn’t work most of the time?

It’s something I hit often and have to do the old microdeposit thing (if I can even figure out how to trick the service into allowing me to do that at all).

Does fidelity just have some sort of broken setup?

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#36

Post by peter_l_downs »

Very excited for this. One of the major issues with Plaid is their poor support for commercial banks -- for instance, SVB. If Stripe can provide more reliable connections to commercial banks, this will be an extremely valuable alternative.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#37

Post by zachperret »

gonehome wrote: post #35
zachperret wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! Plaid is integrated with ~every bank that has an API, and in many cases we've actually helped the banks build API's themselves.

Do you know why Fidelity Investments plaid connection doesn’t work most of the time? It’s something I hit often and have to do the old microdeposit thing (if I can even figure out how to trick the service into allowing me to do that at all). Does fidelity just have some sort of broken setup?

Great question. I do not know off the top of my head, but can look into it.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#38

Post by codegeek »

zinekeller wrote: post #4

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.

"are US banking really this dysfunctional?"

Yes very much. A lot of banks don't even have 2FA and most that do only offer SMS based. APIs, forget about them. Walk before we can run.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#39

Post by chrisseaton »

zinekeller wrote: post #4

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.

In the US your public bank account number is effectively a password to debit your account! There’s literally no authorisation at all!
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