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Stripe Financial Connections

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Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#51

Post by paxys »

rglover wrote: post #6
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.

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

What they run on their backend doesn't really matter. If they can provide a website with username/password login, they can have an OAuth layer as well. It isn't a technical problem but a business/priorities one.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#52

Post by cj »

nitsky wrote: post #42
kadomony wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competition is healthy. Whether it's good or bad, we'll see. No one can divine that, but I get the sense that Plaid's product team is a bit worried right now.

I wonder why it took so many years for Stripe to start competing in this area.

One possible reason is that ACH payments are MUCH more user friendly if they can be initiated by an end-user authorizing their bank account (compared to digging up their account #, routing #, etc and entering the info manually).

ACH payments are essentially free to process (or a very small flat fee). This is very different from credit card transactions that charge a % of the entire transaction.

If ACH / direct payments from bank accounts became more common through services like Plaid and Stripe's new service, it could mean less fees (less revenue) for Stripe to collect. Which could explain why it's not something Stripe jumped into earlier.

TLDR: if I had to guess, there's more money in processing credit card payments, and much less money in facilitating ACH transactions.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#55

Post by edwinarbus »

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…

Edwin from Stripe here. Stripe does integrate directly with banks. In our beta period, most volume we’ve seen has been over bank APIs. Some banks do not have APIs—we use financial partners to connect with them, and we’re talking with many banks in hopes that they will enable direct API access soon.

Our pricing is upfront: https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing. We’ve worked with a large beta group of users to make sure the pricing is in line with what they see in the market.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#56

Post by zerocrates »

transportgo wrote: post #26

The currency and account names used in the demo seems to be localized. I get kr and olanordman (johndoe in the US?) on my Norwegian IP device If it gets peoples attention like it did mine maybe it’s worth the dev time to implement?

Jane Diaz is the name in the US actually.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#58

Post by 88913527 »

whockey wrote: post #57

[]

It's probably financially optimal to put a nice veneer on an existing solution than to make something whole-cloth. They're running a business, not a charity, and besides -- as the consumer, why would you care? All you see is the facade anyways; unless you're making a point that the API's are actually leaky abstractions and the facade isn't that good (and I would respect that argument, if it were the case).

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#59

Post by animal_spirits »

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.

I remember about 4 years ago I read online that most bank passwords did not even check for upper case or lowercase characters. I didn't believe it, but to my surprise I entered my password with RaNDoM cASe letters and it unbelievably logged me in. This was Chase bank, and I believe it has been fixed since then. But just goes to show how far behind banking systems have been.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#60

Post by whatshisface »

whockey wrote: post #57

[]

If Stripe knows how to pay developers appropriate salaries (this is the under-discussed reason for SV companies being the only ones who can make good APIs - BoA is never going to pay their web team more than they pay their web team's department head, that is not possible for their culture) to develop appropriate interfaces on things, then more power to them if they can do very simple things to profit in the context of the oversights of other companies.
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