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Stripe Financial Connections

stripe.com

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Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#191

Post by _mmgc »

Seems like a shiny repackaging of Finicity/MX.com with little value added. I don't see any reason to recommend this product to anyone. Or maybe they're targeting a different market. This solves exactly none of the issues I've had working with almost every bank aggregation API on the planet (Yodlee, Plaid, Finicity, Tink, Nordigen, Belvo). And boy, do they have issues.

As the founder at [name-redacted] (personal/SMB finance plugin), I deal with bank connection issues on a daily basis.

- Screen scraping is 1. flaky and 2. insecure because it requires saving credentials and is 3. not realtime and 4. doesn't work with 2FA. Account balances can be out of date within minutes, and cannot be refreshed without another auth

- 95% of banks on the planet don't have OAuth APIs. The 5% that do have APIs that often don't serve customer needs because they provide the absolute minimum amount of data to meet the requirement. For example CapitalOne's API only provides access to 90 days of data. American Express does not provide access to invoice metadata, which makes reconciliation hard. Who can provide dedicated direct screen-scraping connections to banks with all the data that users want?

- When building a generic fintech product (as I do), global bank coverage is essential. The least bit of innovation Stripe could have done was save me the trouble of having to integrate 5 different APIs to get access to US, European, Latin American and Australian banks.

- In the same vein, connection to 90% of accounts is useless for many users if they can't access the other 10%. The number one need for financial planning software is "to see all my accounts in one place". Most people have at least one account with some obscure institution or overseas bank. If they can't see all their accounts in one place, this isn't solving the problem.

- This is just an API without a GUI dashboard. Another common complaint I've heard from my leads that Plaid/Finicity is only for programmers, or companies that have programming expertise. What if you're a marketing firm with need for no-code bank data visibility?

- Only 180 days of transaction data and no statements? This is much worse than Plaid and Finicity.

I guess it's nice if you can verify ACH details faster, but even then the coverage is worse than Plaid, and so I don't see any reason to recommend this product to anyone. Zero innovation and objectively worse than the current offering? Who is the target market here?

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#193

Post by edwinwee »

pbreit wrote: post #175
edwinwee wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, is your Stripe account live (i.e. in livemode with payments activated)? We'll look into make this smoother, but right now you'll have to leave testmode to continue.

I keep getting "An unexpected error occurred when trying to use instant verification."

When activating your Stripe account? Could you screenshot and send to support@stripe.com and CC edwin@stripe.com?

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#194

Post by twelve40 »

nope1234 wrote: post #169

I honestly can't believe that there's enough people dumb enough to give their bank username/password combo to strangers to make services like this work. Nope nope nope. As a user, I'd never use any service that is plaid based, I don't even care that "they have proper api access now". Even though I've been fan of other stripe offerings I'd never use this either. It's beyond shady. Friends don't let friends give out th…

there are at least 100 million people who've used Plaid alone, not to mention other aggregators (MX, Finicity, Yodlee, etc)

like it or not, it is a mainstream thing by now.

plus, as others have mentioned here, with oauth-enabled banks the aggregators just get a temporary token.

https://www.protocol.com/fintech/plaid-lawsuit-settlement-op...

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#196

Post by twelve40 »

kintalo wrote: post #75

The limit to only daily pulls and up to 180 days of historical data is pretty disappointing. Would expect Stripe to push the envelope here and move down to near-instant updates and full historical data. This is basically a knockoff of existing solutions done at par or worse which is surprising to see from a company like Stripe. Maybe they've lost a bit of their magic or focus. Will be interesting to see how everyone…

since they are heavily based on existing aggregators, they are limited by the lowest common denominator (if a good chunk of e.g. Yodlee-scraped credit unions only support 180 days, then that's a limiting factor for everyone).

I would expect they will gradually improve and cut out other aggregators and replace with direct connections that have more & better data as they go along.

Or maybe not, because with Oauth they then become at the mercy of the bank that issues the token (banks can revoke tokens or attach individual conditions on what data is accessed and how much).

It's not an easy business to be in.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#197

Post by seenit »

Hostile integrations using scripts to obtain financial data is trivial. Frameworks such as:

https://github.com/teampoltergeist/poltergeist

is an excellent example of such a framework. Implementing "bank drivers" using such frameworks would not be difficult.

Plaid and others seem to have done an awesome job scaling the hostile integration pattern. However, the idea that Stripe decided to build this in-house rather than rely on Plaid is perfectly reasonable.

After all, the tools to implement such a product are well known.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#198

Post by astrange »

iknowstuff wrote: post #63
edwinarbus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Capital One does, but for some reason the connection process breaks if I have an ad blocker enabled even if I whitelist their domain.

Chase does at least for credit cards.

Betterment has app passwords, which is better than using your full password.

Re: Stripe Financial Connections

#200

Post by kintalo »

psanford wrote: post #168

So could I use this to build a personal tool to track account balances over time?

Yes, you could. You would be limited to 180 days of history on initial pull and your data would always be up to 1 day behind. Otherwise, yes, you could. It doesn't really feel like this product is aimed towards aggregators or dashboard and more for underwriting and bank account validation.
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