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Stripe Financial Connections

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Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#111

Post by lambda_lord »

stu2b50 wrote: post #106
msoad wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case tweet disappears: > Wow! Jay, you took interviews with Plaid & asked probing questions multiple times over the past few years, and your team sent repeated RFP's (under NDA!) to us asking for tons of detailed data. I wish y'all the best with these products, but surprising to see the methods.

I’m surprised they had this information so easily at hand. How did they even know that? They saw the tweet and the first thing that comes to mind is to query all the people they’ve interviewed?

It wasn’t some IC interviewing for a job, it was a representative of Stripe and Plaid doing a product interview for a possible partnership.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#112

Post by thomaslord »

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…

It sounds like the issue noted above is less the actual pricing, and more that it's difficult to find out what the pricing is.

This matches up with my personal experience - I had to get in touch with an actual human and ask them for the pricing just to see if a project would be viable. I did get a relatively fast response that made the pricing very clear, but because it didn't come with any caveats (e.g. volume-based pricing or "we need to negotiate pricing on a per-client basis") it almost made the experience more frustrating.

Basically if your pricing is simple and universal enough that you could post it directly to the pricing page, you should post it to the pricing page. Especially for developer-focused products, hiding the pricing can lead to a serious reduction in conversion.

My use case is transaction data so the pricing for Stripe's competing product isn't posted yet, but if I was choosing between the two products and only one had pricing clearly posted on the website I'd immediately go with that one unless the pricing was so ridiculous that it wasn't affordable. And if the pricing was ridiculous, I'd probably assume that Plaid's pricing was just as bad.

Basically, I should be able to evaluate your product and its pricing without engaging with any of your employees wherever possible. I routinely remove companies from consideration because I can't plug them into a spreadsheet of prices without going back and forth with a sales team whose time I'll just be wasting anyway.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#114

Post by mwt »

boringg wrote: post #101

Is this logic right or wrong: All of these fintech companies allow for more convenient movement of money and integration with applications etc however they are adding additional costs to all transactions. I.e. were trading convenience for cost?

Are they adding costs? The baseline of ~3% to wire money seems already high.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#115

Post by fintechguy1234 »

FintechRisen wrote: post #96
zht wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unlikely Stripe has access to any APIs that Plaid doesn't also have access to.

We've found that Plaid only leverages around 3-4 Direct API connections for some reason, why other aggregators like MX, Finicity, Yodlee all have 10+. It seems suspect to me because Plaid doesn't seem to be prioritizing the protection of user credentials the same way others are.

This is false. Hundreds of banks have built out api's on plaid exchange: https://plaid.com/plaid-exchange/

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#116

Post by tomatowurst »

cagr wrote: post #71
vincentmarle wrote: post #61

Plaid CEO has some words for Stripe: https://twitter.com/zachperret/status/1521898404061716480

Ryan Breslow vindicated again...

I'm genuinely worried for that guy. He's exposing powerful connected people and I can't really see that end well. It's not like people retweeting and liking his tweets have any sort of power like what is alleged.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#117

Post by [deleted] »

FintechRisen wrote: post #91
iknowstuff wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which banks have OAuth APIs? I would love to switch to one of those instead of exposing my password due to my bank's incompetence.

MX and Finicity both have OAuths to like 80+% of the top 20 financial institutions. There's a reason Plaid doesn't want people switching to them and it's hella sus

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#118

Post by propogandist »

if you've ever used Yodlee or a similar "verify your bank" service, change your bank account password and you'll start seeing a surge in "suspicious login attempts" alerts (if your bank notifies you of such things) as these data scraping services are constantly trying to check-in on your personal financial activity

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#119

Post by amonroe369 »

naiwenwt wrote: post #40
yohannparis wrote: post #5

My question is does this use banks own API, or works like Plaid by doing web-scrapping? I'll prefer the former.

Plaid moved away from scraping years ago, most integrations these days are through APIs.

No they didn't. November 2021 was not that long ago.

"You may be a Class Member if you are a United States resident and you connected a financial account to an app between January 1, 2013 and November 19, 2021....

"This class action alleges Plaid took certain improper actions in connection with this process. The allegations include that Plaid: (1) obtained more financial data than was needed by a user's app"

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#120

Post by judge2020 »

FintechRisen wrote: post #91
iknowstuff wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which banks have OAuth APIs? I would love to switch to one of those instead of exposing my password due to my bank's incompetence.

MX and Finicity both have OAuths to like 80+% of the top 20 financial institutions. There's a reason Plaid doesn't want people switching to them and it's hella sus

Plaid used oauth for Bank of America circa 2019 when I tried, and currently uses Capital One's oauth when I try to log into it. I'm sure they use it when it's convenience (or maybe when the financial institution mandates it).
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