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Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

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Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#131

Post by 60secz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #122
itslennysfault wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A prime example of this is the response Slack gave when Microsoft launched Teams. It was a direct copy-cat and they didn't throw a temper tantrum. They welcomed Microsoft into the space and saw it as validation of their product.

> it was a direct copy-cat and they didn't throw a temper tantrum I’m seeing people conclude a lot more about Plaid from the CEO’s outburst than from Stripe’s announcement. If a competitor throws into your ring and your first move is to call foul on technicalities, it suggests you don’t think you can win on merit alone.

This. Moat harder.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#132

Post by CPLX »

collectedparts wrote: post #130
cj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone would argue that it's a blow to the chest for Plaid. But, that's business. Plaid has raised $700m+ and is valued $10+ billion according to Wikipedia. This move by Stripe is absolutely one that any competent leadership team should have expected would happen sooner or later.

Nit: I think you meant "I don't think anyone would dispute that it's a blow". Saying "I don't think anyone would argue that X" means "I don't think anyone thinks X".

I think his phrasing is also grammatical English. The degree to which it sounds right or wrong is probably idiomatic.

"it's a blow to the chest for Plaid" is a coherent phrase

"I don't think anyone would argue that" is a coherent phrase that contains a pronoun, "that." The antecedent of this pronoun is that first phrase.

I don't think anyone would argue X can mean the statement X is so true nobody would argue it.

An example would be "I don't think anyone would argue the legitimacy of George Washington as the first president of the US" or "I don't think anyone would argue the merits of food when you're hungry"

Therefore the phrase can be correctly interpreted to mean:

I don't think anyone would argue that -> [it's a blow to the the chest for Plaid]

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#133

Post by bornfreddy »

SnowHill9902 wrote: post #126
davidatbu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any sufficiently good idea is really hard to communicate but really easy to demonstrate. I'm gonna steal this.

That phrase was his idea.

But it was just communicated. Wait till they demonstrate it.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#134

Post by Dma54rhs »

cercatrova wrote: post #83
rabidonrails wrote: post #26

I think that people underestimate what this feels like for the Plaid founder and potentially for Patrick too. For Plaid you've spent your life building this business. Presumably there are many happy customers and you're working really hard to define the space and provide service. One morning you flip on your laptop and see a headline that one of your customers (and competitors) launched a new service that directly co…

This is a strange comment. This is literally how business and competition works, and how customers benefit as a result. No doubt it sucks to have a product competed with but that's just business. Of all areas on the Internet I'd have expected those on HN to understand, as it's run by a VC who is all about disruption of the competition.

And the the valuation fir the smaller company is 10 billion. Its not like they are crushing your mom and pop shop here.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#135

Post by sangnoir »

milesskorpen wrote: post #129
sangnoir wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience. I regret handing over my bank login details to Plaid, since they scraped my bank statements without stating so upfront and offered that information to 3rd parties (indirectly, as a score of some sort, IIRC, but that's scraping very personal information). When I mentioned it on HN a year or 2 ago, someone who works…

The class action was settled — which just means it was cheaper to settle than to fight in court, not that there was wrong doing. This kind of thing is very very common, and the settlement amount was modest in the scheme of class action settlements. Plaid is pretty clear in their privacy policy that they DO NOT repackage and resell data (they do sell data - as in, when you use Plaid to give your banking info to a mort…

> If banks didn't want Plaid to do screen scraping, they could build APIs.

Even if we take this as a given - what if customers don't want Plaid to scrape their data? I only used Plaid to verify that I own the bank account - but they went out of their way to scrape my transaction information, just because they could, and that data is valuable - that is messed up. I'm sure if my bank had an API, Plaid would still have hoovered up my transaction information, so the "API access vs Scraping" debate is a sideshow.

If they hadn't scraped my transaction information, I wouldn't have been part of the class, but they chose to maximize data collection. If it had been Facebook or Google that harvested financial info the way Plaid did, no one would be saying "Their TOS is clear about it". Additionally, any big tech company can purchase Plaid and get that data (I can't remember if the settlement has a provision for deletion of that data).

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#136

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #109
eins1234 wrote: post #91

A lot of comments here saying that this is the death knell for Plaid, but I wouldn't be so sure. Stripe has launched competitors to existing fintech products and failed to gain traction plenty of times before. Example: Remember the Stripe Corporate Card? It was "launched" as invite-only 3 years ago and is still invite only today, with little signs of traction. Meanwhile both Brex and Ramp have become decacorns throug…

> Meanwhile both Brex and Ramp have become decacorn That was at peak bubble. Given that most public Fintech companies crashed around 70% from ATH I assume the same holds for Brex and Ramp.

So now they're just tricorn?

(The things you can do to/with a language ... "Verbing weirds language" takes the cake, though.)

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#137

Post by websap »

kbos87 wrote: post #33

I don’t know all the specifics of the interaction that happened here, but the hard truth is that if you aren’t eventually expecting this to happen to your business - regardless of the space you are in - you aren’t being realistic about the nature of competition in SaaS. Plaid has enjoyed years of life without much direct competition. My hunch is that few other businesses were interested in the space because it feels…

Stripe seems to be gearing up to become the AWS of the FinTech world.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#138

Post by chrisseaton »

SpikedCola wrote: post #106
sangnoir wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience. I regret handing over my bank login details to Plaid, since they scraped my bank statements without stating so upfront and offered that information to 3rd parties (indirectly, as a score of some sort, IIRC, but that's scraping very personal information). When I mentioned it on HN a year or 2 ago, someone who works…

This is something that absolutely blows my mind. The bank's terms of service say you can't hand over your password to anyone, and here is Plaid asking users for their login information! I can't understand how they can ask users to breach terms of service, and have gotten so far.

Why isn't it done through a proper API that you grant them a token for?

And how do Plaid bypass your bank's per-login 2FA if they're logging in as is they were a user?

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#140

Post by ivank »

jeroenhd wrote: post #55
endisneigh wrote: post #4

I’ll never get over how regressive it is that we are literally clicking on images filled with text as a way to share… text. I seriously cringe each time, lol. Anyway, on topic, it’s good to see this little debacle behind them. Both stripe and plaid offer good services and competition is good in any case. I do wonder if there’s some room for innovation here from Google and Apple. It would be interesting to see if it’s…

Luckily, Twitter has accessibility options which you can use to describe/transcribe images so that people with visual disabilities can enjoy your content too! Not that anybody ever uses that feature.

I use that feature, but it’s effectively broken with the 1000 character restriction.
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